Torben Iversen

Torben Iversen is the Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University, and also serves as chair of the Harvard Political Economy and Government Program.  Mr. Iversen was born in Denmark, and received his B.A. there from Aahhus University.  He later attended Duke University, where he earned a Ph.D. in political science in 2005. His research and teaching interests include comparative political economy and electoral politics.  His many honors include terms as an International Fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, and as a Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution.  Mr. Iversen has also been awarded grants by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at the National Science Foundation, and by the Social Science Research Council.

He has published several books, all published by Cambridge University Press:  Contested Economic Institutions: The Politics of Macroeconomics and Wage Bargaining in Advanced Democracies (1999); and Unions, Employers, and Central Banks: Macroeconomic Coordination and Institutional Change in Social Market Economies (edited with Jonas Pontusson and David Soskice, 2000); and, most recently, Capitalism, Democracy, and Welfare (Cambridge UP, 2005), which was honored as the Best Book on European Politics and Society by the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 2006. APSA also honored two of his articles, published in the American Journal of Political Science  and the American Political Science Review, with its Best Paper on Political Economy Award and the Gregory Luebbert Best Article Award.

During his Guggenheim Fellowship term, he will be working on a study of democracy, distribution, and the representation of economic interests.