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The Central Role of Comparative Politics in Political Analysis
Author(s) -
Blondel Jean
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
scandinavian political studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.65
H-Index - 41
eISSN - 1467-9477
pISSN - 0080-6757
DOI - 10.1111/j.0080-6757.2005.00127.x
Subject(s) - politics , democracy , modernization theory , haven , political science , sociology , humanities , economic history , history , law , philosophy , mathematics , combinatorics
I can hardly find words to thank adequately Swedish academia in general and Swedish political science in particular for the way you are honouring me today. As some of you know, I cherish Sweden in a special fashion. After I made a first trip to your country in the early 1970s, as Director of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), and visited the political science departments at Goteborg, Stockholm, Uppsala, Umea and Lund, I had the privilege to be invited several times to Sweden for periods of intensive teaching, in both Stockholm and Uppsala, and to address the Swedish Political Science Association. I was then honoured some years ago to be made a member of the Royal Swedish Academy. Meanwhile, my wife and I enjoyed the friendship of many among you and, in particular, of Gunnar Sjoblom, Olof and Inger Ruin and Leif and Barbro Lewin. You are now awarding me the most treasured prize in political science and thus associating me with the illustrious scholars on whom you have bestowed the Skytte Prize. I am immensely proud to feel that I am part of such a group. Thank you, thank you, thank you and long live Sweden! Allow me to thank, in the context of the honour that you are awarding me, the institutions with which I have been most closely involved over the last forty years: the Department of Government at the University of Essex, the European Consortium for Political Research and, since the mid-1980s, the European University Institute in Florence and the University of Siena. These institutions have given me the opportunity to devote my life to comparative politics. I wish to thank them profoundly. I also wish to record three mentors to whom I owe a particular debt. The first, chronologically, is Maurice Duverger. I never was close to him, but his Les partis politiques (1951) shaped my interests. I learnt that institutions had a key role in political life but that, to understand them, one had to study them across nations. Still chronologically, my second mentor was, naturally,