John D. Stephens

John D. Stephens, Gerhard E. Lenski, Jr., Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology, and Director, Center for European Studies, received his B.A. (1970) from Harvard University and his Ph.D. (1976) from Yale University. His main interests are comparative politics and political economy, with area foci on Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. He teaches European politics and the political economy of advanced industrial societies. He is the author of The Transition from Capitalism to Socialism (1979) and coauthor of Democratic Socialism in Jamaica (with Evelyne Huber, 1986), Capitalist Development and Democracy (with Evelyne Huber and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, 1992; co-winner of the Outstanding Book Award from the American Sociological Association, Political Sociology Section), and Development and Crisis of the Welfare State (with Evelyne Huber, 2001; winner of the Best Book Award 2001 from the American Political Science Association, Political Economy Section). He has also contributed articles to, among others, the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Social Research, and World Politics. He is currently working on a study of social policy in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Iberia. He has been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst, Germany, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences in Uppsala, the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

His project for the Fellowship period is a comparison of welfare states or, more modestly, social policy regimes in Latin America and Southern Europe, with a focus on identifying the political conditions that are conducive to the establishment of social policy regimes with the capacity to reduce poverty and inequality in human capital.