Author: Stein Rokkan

Professor Stein ROKKAN was born in Norway, 4 July 1921 and most regretfully died in Bergen on 22 July 1979, after this work was completed. He taught at Bergen and also at Yale, Stanford, Geneva, London, Manchester and Paris. Stein ROKKAN was active in comparative political” research since the late 1940s when he joined a team at UNESCO to review variations in the usage of the word democracy. Subsequently, he was active in comparative research on the growth of mass democracy and the development of party systems in Western Europe. Besides, his international activities in favour of the development of the social sciences were manifold. He played a leading role in the formulation of the programme of Norwegian electoral research carried out since 1956. He wrote several works orr electoral mobilization and regional contrasts in a historical perspective. Over the last 10 years he became increasingly interested in the building of a general model for the interaction of geopolitics and geoeconomics in the structuring of the territorial systems of Western Europe. He took an active part since the mid-fifties in the movement to develop data archives for the social sciences. Nationally, he established the Norwegian Social Science Data Services. Internationally, he worked in close co-operation with others in the field of data archives and infrastructures for social science research. In 1963, he took part in organizing the first major international conference on data for comparative research. Since the early 1970s, he took the initiative to arrange annual International Summer Schools, Training Seminars as well as Workshops under the auspices of the European Consortium for Political Research and the International Social Science Council. He was a prolific writer and a frequent contributor to numerous social science journals. Among his most well known books are Democracy in a World of Tensions (1950), Approaches to the Study of Political Participation (1962), Comparing Nations (1966), Data Archives for the Social Sciences (1966), Comparative Research Across Cultures and Nations (1968), Citizens, Electi&ns, Parties (1970), Building States and Nations (1973-1974), Cross-National Comparative Survey Research (1977).