Associate Professor in Comparative Politics
Director of the Centre for Studies in Democratization and Programme Director for the MA in Politics

Profile

Renske Doorenspleet joined the Department at Warwick in 2006. She is Programme Director for the MA in Politics, and Director of the Centre for Studies in Democratization. She was mainly educated in the Netherlands, undertook a PhD in political science at Leiden University, and received several national and international awards for her work. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University (USA) , she started a research project on democracy in divided countries, which was funded by the Dutch National Science Foundation. Renske's general research interests are in democratic transitions and consolidation, conflict resolution, Africa, quantitative and qualitative methodology.

Current Research Projects

Renske's previous research has focused on theoretical and empirical explanations of recent transitions to democracy around the world, and she is now interested in how democratized countries are actually functioning, thereby working on the following research projects:

Teaching and Supervision

Renske currently teaches on the second-year undergraduate module 'Core Issues in Comparative Politics' and the postgraduate module 'Comparative Politics'. During the academic year 2011-2012, she has an academic fellowship and grant of the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning, in order to innovate teaching and work on the project 'What, why democracy? Research and Film Projects about Democracy: Students, Academics and Filmmakers United.' Renske is currently first supervisor of PhDs working on 'building political institutions in divided societies: the case of Iraq' and 'elites and democratic consolidation in Colombia and Venezuela'; she is second supervisor of other PhD projects in the field of comparative politics, while working with a CSD postdoc on political participation and democracy in Egypt.

Publications

Renske has published a number of book chapters and articles, e.g. in World Politics, and Acta Politica, and International Political Science Review, and the European Journal of Political Research. Her first book Democratic Transitions: Exploring the Structural Sources of the Fourth Wave (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2005) focused on theoretical and empirical explanations of recent transitions to democracy around the world. Together with Lia Nijzink (Cape Town University), she is editor of Trajectories of One-Party Dominance in African Democracies (under review) and Political Parties, Party Systems and Democracy in Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). An article on dissatisfied democrats in Africa is forthcoming in the IPSR, and she is now working on a new book on the effects of democratization in comparative perspective.

Associate Professor Comparative Politics

Email: renske.doorenspleet@warwick.ac.uk
Room: B0.14 (Social Sciences)
Tel: 024765 22169
Office Hours: Th 2-3 & Fri 1030-1130

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