International Forum for Democratic Studies Research Council Member

Leonardo Morlino

LUISS (Italy)

Leonardo Morlino is professor of political science and director of the Research Center on Democracies and Democratizations at LUISS, Rome. He was president of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) (2009-12). Prof. Morlino’s most recent books include: The Quality of Democracies in Latin America (International IDEA, 2014), Changes for Democracy (Oxford UP, 2011), Democracias y Democratizaciones (CIS, 2008); International Actors, Democratization and the Rule of Law: Anchoring Democracy? (Routledge 2008, with A. Magen); Democratization and the European Union: Comparing Central and Eastern European Post-Communist Countries (Routledge 2010, with W. Sadurski). He was also one of the three editors of the International Encyclopedia of Political Science (8 Volumes, Sage Publications, 2011).

Prof. Morlino was professor of political science at the University of Florence and at the Istituto di Scienze Umane in Florence and has held a number of visiting professorships. In 2002-03 he was the Bechtel Visiting Professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business; in 1995 a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution; and in 1989-90 a NATO Fellow of the Center for European Studies. His academic credentials also include stints as the Monte dei Paschi Fellow at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford (2010), the Jemolo Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford (1998 and 2007); visiting professor at the Juan March Institute, Madrid (1995-96); and visiting professor at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Paris (1993-95, 2006, and 2009). Since 2012, Prof. Morlino has been the deputy rector of LUISS, Rome.

Prof. Morlino is a leading specialist in comparative politics with expertise on Southern Europe (Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece), Eastern Europe, and the phenomenon of democratization. He is the author of several books and more than 200 journal essays and book chapters published in English, French, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Chinese, Mongolian, and Japanese. In these years (2015-16) he’s conducting research on how the economic crisis affected South European democracies and on the economic and fiscal choices of democracies in the same area within a EU Horizon 2020 grant.


Forum Publications

Assessing the Quality of Democracy, co-edited with Larry Diamond (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005)

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