Filip Kostelka – About

Political scientist by training, I am interested in political behaviour, party systems, and democratisation. Among other topics, I study why and when citizens (don’t) vote or protest, and how different political and contextual factors (e.g., political regime change, institutional reform, etc.) affect citizens’ behaviour and attitudes (e.g., democratic satisfaction).

In geographic terms, I mainly focus on post-communist democracies, which I compare with older democratic polities in the West, or more recent democracies in other regions. My secondary geographic interest lies in Western Europe and, in particular, in French politics.

I currently work as Professor and Chair in Political and Social Change in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. I am on academic leave from the Department of Government at the University of Essex and affiliated as associate researcher to the Centre d’études européennes et de politique comparée (CEE), Sciences Po, Paris.

I obtained a PhD in political science from Sciences Po in 2015. André Blais, Jean-Yves Dormagen, Mark Franklin, Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Nonna Mayer (my PhD supervisor) and Milada Vachudova served on my dissertation commitee. My PhD dissertation on voter turnout in post-communist democracies won the biannual Mattei Dogan Award for best dissertation in comparative politics, conferred by the French Political Science Association (AFSP). It was transformed into several peer-reviewed publications including the research article “Does Democratic Consolidation Lead to a Decline in Voter Turnout? Global Evidence Since 1939”, published in the American Political Science Review.

I held pre-doctoral teaching and research positions at Sciences Po, Paris and College of Europe, Bruges. As a postdoctoral fellow, I worked at the Research Chair in Electoral Studies, University of Montreal and was a member of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship (CSDC), Québec. I was involved in the 2014 wave of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) and, for two years (2016-2017), I coordinated the Making Electoral Democracy Work (MEDW) project under the lead of André Blais. I subsequently spent over a year as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institutions and Political Economy Research Group (IPERG), University of Barcelona, where I worked on the Birth of Party Democracy Project in the team of Carles Boix. Before joining the EUI, I worked as Lecturer (Assistant Professor) and Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Department of Government at the University of Essex.

You can check my Google Scholar, Research Gate, and Web of Science profiles, or follow me on Twitter.