Andrew Roberts

Assistant Professor of Political Science
Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research,
Northwestern University
PhD, Political Science, Princeton University, 2003
aroberts@northwestern.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Additional biographical information

Andrew Roberts’ research focuses on three major themes: the quality of democracy— defined as the nature and strength of links between citizens and policymakers—the politics of social policy reforms, and the workings of formal political institutions. Much of his work on these issues looks at the new democracies of Eastern Europe, which he frequently compares to established democracies in Western Europe and North America.

Roberts has recently completed a book manuscript, “The Quality of Democracy in Eastern Europe: Public Preferences and Policy Reform,” that looks at the issues of electoral accountability, policy responsiveness, and the informativeness of political campaigns in 10 Eastern European countries. He has published several papers on political institutions looking in particular at the workings of coalition government in Eastern Europe, but also at more general institutional choices. Some of his other working papers deal with the reform of social policy in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, concentrating on pension, housing, and health-care reforms.

Current Research

The Quality of Democracy. As more of the world turns democratic, scholars have begun to worry that many of the new democracies are not functioning as they should. Many suffer from weak rule of law, low accountability of rulers, and high rates of corruption. This project aims to produce a workable concept of democratic quality and to find appropriate ways of studying quality. It argues that democratic quality is based on linkages between citizens and policymakers and should be studied by focusing on electoral accountability, policy responsiveness, and the “programmaticness” of the party system. It then applies these ideas to assess the quality of democracy in the new democracies in Eastern Europe.

Pension Privatization Around the World. A growing number of states around the world are trying to escape the financial pressures of aging populations by either fully or partially privatizing their pension systems. This project explores the politics behind these switches investigating why and when privatization takes place. Most theories of pension politics have difficulty explaining these privatizations because existing pension schemes are broadly popular and entail large pre-committed expenditures. This project specifies a number of conditions in which privatization becomes politically palatable. Specifically, a loss of public trust in the public scheme and relative confidence in financial markets may induce citizens to support privatization. It finds support for these mechanisms in public opinion and the policy process in new democracies, and the attempted privatization of Social Security in the United States.

Parliamentary Coalitions in Eastern Europe. Virtually all research on coalition government has focused on the established democracies of Western Europe. As a result, we do not know whether existing theories of coalition politics are universal or unique to the context of Western Europe. This project, with IPR Faculty Fellow James Druckman, aims to expand research on government coalitions to the new democracies of Eastern Europe. It considers the effect of the region’s unique economic, social, and cultural circumstances on portfolio allocation, coalition types, and government stability among others. To date, findings have suggested that the legacies of the communist regime have produced distinctive patterns of bargaining over coalitions that force us to revise and expand extant theories of coalition formation.

Partial Veto Points. In the growing study of political institutions, little attention has been paid to bicameralism. This project focuses on the functioning of a largely ignored form of bicameralism. A large number of countries have upper chambers invested with suspensory or amendatory veto power. That is, they can veto or propose amendments to bills passed by the lower house, but these vetoes and amendments can be overridden by a majority of the lower house. This project asks whether and under which conditions an institution with a suspensory or amendatory veto can have a substantive effect on political outcomes. The project also attempts to generalize the functioning of such upper houses to a wider class of institutions that function as “partial veto points.”

Selected Publications

Roberts, A., and J. Druckman. Communist successor parties and coalition formation. Forthcoming in Legislative Studies Quarterly.

Roberts, A., and J. Druckman. Measuring portfolio salience in Eastern European parliamentary democracies. Forthcoming in European Journal of Political Research.

Roberts, A. From Good King Wenceslas to the Good Soldier Svejk: A Dictionary of Czech Popular Culture. New York: Central European University Press (2005).

Roberts, A., and J. Druckman. 2005. Context and coalition bargaining: Comparing portfolio allocation in Eastern and Western Europe. Party Politics 11(5): 535-55.

Roberts, A. 2002. The politics and anti-politics of nostalgia. East European Politics and Societies 16(3): 764-809.