24th IPSA Executive Committee Elected

Biography / Biographie:

Elklit is professor of political science at Aarhus University in Denmark, where he has held various positions since 1970, including two periods as Head of Department. His key areas of interest are elections (electoral behavior, electoral systems, electoral administration and assessment of electoral quality), but he has also worked with democratization, ethnicity, political parties and party systems, local politics, and the use of textual analysis in political science. in 1999 he was a research fellow at the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame.

In 2012, the Danish Political Science Association awarded him its Rasmussen Prize. During the first six month of 2014 Elklit has been the van Zyl Slabbert Visiting Professor at University of Cape Town's Department of political Studies. In early 2016 he was a visiting fellow at the project on Perceptions of Electoral Integrity at the University of Sydney.

Elklit has also since 1990 been heavily engaged in advisory and consultative work in new and transforming democracies, where he is now recognized as a leading expert. He has in various capacities worked in more than 20 countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa, including Bosnia-Herzegovina and his native Denmark, Nepal, China, Tanzania, Lesotho, Kenya, and South Africa. He was in 2008 Secretary to the Independent Review Commission in Kenya, which for the international community and the government of Kenya interrogated the 2007 presidential and parliamentary elections, and he was in 1994 one of the five international members of the Independent Electoral Commission in South Africa, which conducted the 1994 elections in that country. The South African Government also appointed him as the only non-South African member of the 2002-3 Electoral Task Team. He has been bestowed with several awards for his work in these fields over the years.

Elklit has a considerable production of books, edited volumes (all with own contributions)and papers in professional journals within his fields of professional interest.

Biography / Biographie:

Political scientist with specialization in public administration and the analysis of judicial systems, with special emphasis on comparative studies. He has analyzed in depth the characters of judicial guarantees of independence, their main traits and their evolution. A similar attention has been devoted to the status and role of public prosecution and to the principle of compulsory prosecution. More recently, his interests have focused on the process of judicialization of politics - that is, the expansion of judicial power - with specific attention to Italy and Europe and on the increasing significance of supranational and transnational justice for national courts. Beside university teaching, he has extensively participated to judicial training, especially at the Belgian, French, Italian and Spanish judicial schools.

1949 Born in Milan, Italy. Italian citizen
1973 Graduate (political science) magna cum laude from University of Florence
1975-86 Research scholar, assistant professor, associate professor, Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Bologna
1986-88 Professor of political science, Department of Social and Economic Sciences, University of Calabria
1988-1990Professor of public administration, High School of Public Administration, Rome
1990- Professor of political science, University of Bologna

Biography / Biographie:

Christopher Isike, PhD is a Professor of African politics and development, and Head of Department Politics and International Studies, University of Zululand, South Africa. An Africanist scholar by research standpoint, Prof Isike’s teaching and research interests revolve around the quality of women’s political representation in Africa, women and peace-building in Africa, African immigration to South Africa, human security, human factor development in Africa, African soft power politics and development dynamics. A C3 rated researcher by South Africa’s National Research Foundation (NRF), Prof Isike has published scores of quality articles in international peer-reviewed journals. He consults for the UNFPA, UNICEF, UN Women and the KwaZulu-Natal provincial government on gender equality and women empowerment issues in the province. In recognition of his work on gender equality in Africa, he was selected by the South African government to be part of a KwaZulu-Natal government delegation to Ethiopia on a study tour to explore its social transformation model in ending early childhood/forced marriages in 2013. Prof Isike has just finished a one year sabbatical stint as Senior Research Advisor at the Shell Petroleum Development Company in Nigeria where he was a programme monitoring and evaluation specialist in the External Relations Department of the company. He is a Council and Executive member of the South African Association of Political Science (SAAPS), a member of the International Political Science Association (IPSA), Canadian Association of African Studies (CAAS), EPOS; Global conflict mediation and resolution network and Ontario International Development Agency (OIDA). He is happily married to Dr Efe Isike and they have 3 beautiful children; Oghenevieze (8), Ogheneruonah (6) and Oghenemaro (4).

Biography / Biographie:

Park, Chan Wook is a professor of Political Science and International Relations at Seoul National University, and dean of the College of Social Sciences. Park is a former president of the Korean Political Science Association, and now a vice chairman of the Korean Social Science Research Council. Park received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. His research focuses on the comparative study of legislatures, parties, and elections, and has published numerous English language articles and written chapters for books.

He taught as an assistant professor at Franklin and Marshall College, and as a visiting professor at Duke University in the United States. He also taught as a visiting professor at Waseda University in Japan. At Seoul National University, he served as vice dean at the College of Social Sciences, chair of the Department of Political Science, director of the American Studies Institute, director of the Institute for Korean Political Studies, and director of the BK21 Political Science Paradigm Project. He served on the Korean Presidential Advisory Commission on Policy Planning, and on advisory committees for state agencies, including the National Assembly Speaker and Board of Audit and Inspection. He also sat on advisory panels for the Constitutional Court, National Assembly Research Service, Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs, and Korea Institute of Public Administration. He once served as director general of Asian Consortium for Political Research.

Biography / Biographie:

Shirin M. Rai is Professor in the department of Politics and International Studies. She has written extensively on issues of gender, governance and development in journals such as Signs, Hypatia, New Political Economy, International Feminist Journal of Politics and Political Studies. She has consulted with the United Nations’ Division for the Advancement of Women and UNDP. She is a founder member of the South Asia Research Network on Gender, Law and Governance, and she was Director of the Leverhulme Trust programme on Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament (2007-2011). She serves on the Editorial Boards of International Feminist Journal of Politics, Politics and Gender, Global Ethics and Indian Journal of Gender Studies and Political Studies Quarterly and on the International Studies Association Publications Committee.

Her current work has three strands: feminist international political economy, gender and political institutions and politics and performance. She has recently published on depletion through social reproduction (IfJP, 2014) where she analyses the costs of doing social reproductive work, how this might be measured and transformed. She has also published two edited collections on performance and/or politics where she explores how performance in and of institutional and informal politics are co-constitutive (Routledge, 2015; Palgrave 2014).

Her latest books include New Frontiers in Feminist Political Economy (with Georgina Waylen), Democracy in Practice: Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament (ed. Palgrave, 2014) and The Grammar of Politics and Performance (eds. with Janelle Reinelt, Routledge, 2015)

Prof Rai is the co-Lead of the University of Warwick's Global Research Priority Programme on International Development.