Giovanni Sartori

Director of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales of Paris


Giovanni Sartori is Emeritus Professor at the University of Florence, the present-day hub of Italian political science and one of the benchmark organisations for world political science, as well as Columbia University´s Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities (New York). He is also the founder the Revista Italiana de Ciencia Política. He has been a member since 1988 of the Academia dei Lincei and is vice-president of Societá Libera, for the study and promotion of liberal ideas within society. He is also doctor honoris causa at the universities of Genoa (Italy), Georgetown (Washington), Guadalajara (Mexico), Buenos Aires, (Argentina), the Complutense (Madrid) and Bucharest (Romania). He contributes regularly as leader writer to the Corriere della Sera.

He has been translated into over thirty languages, with Comparative Constitutional Engineering: an Inquiry into Structures, Incentives and Outcomes (1994), What is Democracy? (1997), and Homo Videns: the telly-led society (1998) -a reflection on the dangers of television for both the individual and society in general- figuring prominently amongst his works. He published Pluralism, Multiculturalism and Foreigners: an Essay on Multiethnic Society in 2001. Political development and political engineering (1968), Parties and Party Systems (1976) -which won him the American Political Science Association´s Outstanding Book Award- The influence of electoral systems: Faulty laws or faulty method? (1986) and The theory of democracy revisited (1987) figure amongst his early works; some, indeed, are now considered classics.