Giovanni Capoccia

MA Laurea Rome I, PhD EUI Florence

AFFILIATION

Government and Politics Network

College

Corpus Christi College

Students

website

Giovanni Capoccia's personal webpage

giovanni.capoccia@politics.ox.ac.uk

phone

(01865) 276752

Research

My research focuses on democracy and democratization, democratic backsliding, political institutions, political extremism, and European politics.

A major theme of my research is the analysis of the causes and consequences of the strategies used by democratic governments to control extremist dissent. My work on democratic crises in inter-war Europe has been published in several journals and a research monograph entitled Defending Democracy (Johns Hopkins University Press 2005, paperback 2007), which received the APSA Award for the Best Book in European Politics.

A second theme of my research is democratization. I have co-edited the collection The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies, published as a double special issue of Comparative Political Studies in 2010. The volume proposes a new research agenda for the study of democratization in Europe and elsewhere, focused on the dynamics of institutional change.

Finally, I have recently completed a project on the impact of democratic attitudes of different transitional justice policies, which focuses on the historical case of West Germany after 1945. The results have been published in Comparative Political Studies and in Comparative Politics (forthcoming).

This and other work has earned several other publication prizes, including the Sage Award for the Best Paper in Comparative Politics; the Sage Award for the Best Paper in Qualitative Methods; the Alexander George Award for the Best Article Developing and Applying Qualitative and Multiple Methods; the Award for the Best Paper in Comparative Democratization; and the Mary Parker Follett Award for the Best Article in Politics and History, all from the American Political Science Association.

I have held a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship and a Leverhume Trust Major Research Fellowship, as well as visiting positions in several academic institutions including the University of Heidelberg, the University of California at Berkeley, the Max-Planck-Institute in Comparative Law (Heidelberg), the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard, where I was the Rita E. Hauser Fellow.

I am currently working on two projects. One project, in collaboration with Prof. Isabela Mares (Yale), analyzes how liberal democracies can counter backsliding. We held project conferences both at Oxford and Yale, and plan to finalize a collective volume soon. A second project is a research monograph on how postwar Western European democracies have restricted the extreme right.

I welcome inquiries from potential graduate students interested in pursuing MPhil or doctoral projects on democratization, political extremism in democracies, democratic backsliding, and transitional justice, in particular in the context of European political development.

View Giovanni Capoccia's personal webpage.

Research interests

Constitutions, Institutions and Governments, Elections and electoral politics, Comparative Politics and Government, Democracy and Democratisation, Historical approaches to Political Analysis.