M. Donald Hancock is professor emeritus of political science at Vanderbilt University. He has previously taught at Columbia University, the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, and the universities of Bielefeld and Mannheim in Germany. Hancock is the founding director of two centers for European Studies—the first at UT Austin and the second, founded in 1981, at Vanderbilt. The latter is now designated the Max Kade Center for European and German Studies (which Hancock has also served as associate director for outreach activities). He is the coauthor (with Henry Krisch) of Politics in Germany (2009), and co-editor and coauthor of Transitions to Capitalism and Democracy in Russia and Central Europe (2000), German Unification: Process and Outcomes (1994), and Managing Modern Capitalism: Industrial Renewal and Workplace Democracy in the United States and Western Europe (1991). Hancock has served as co-chair of the Council for European Studies and as president of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies and the Conference Group on German Politics. He is currently working on a collaborative study of economic, societal, and military security in the Baltic region.Marjorie Castle is associate professor (lecturer) in political science at the University of Utah. She is the author of two books on Polish politics: Triggering Communism′s Collapse: Perceptions and Power in Poland′s Transition (2003) and Democracy in Poland (2002), coauthored with Ray Taras.Christopher J. Carman is the John Anderson Senior Research Lecturer in politics at the University of Strathclyde. He previously taught at Glasgow, Pittsburgh, and Rice Universities. His research specializes in the behavioral and institutional aspects of political representation. He is a co-author of Elections and Voters in Britain (2011), with David Denver and Robert Johns, and Of Conscience and Constituents: Religiosity and the Political Psychology of Representation in America (2011) with David Barker. He has also published a variety of articles on British, Scottish and American politics as well as conducted evaluations of the Scotland’s Public Petitions System for the Scottish Parliament.David P. Conradt has been a professor of political science at East Carolina University since 1993. From 1968 to 1993 he was at the University of Florida (Gainesville). He has also held joint appointments at universities in Konstanz, Mannheim, Cologne, and Dresden. Among his recent publications are The German Polity (Tenth Edition); A Precarious Victory: Schr?der and the German Elections of 2002 (2005); and Power Shift in Germany: The 1998 Election and the End of the Kohl Era (2000). He has also published a variety of articles and monographs on German political culture, parties, and elections, including ‘‘The Shrinking Elephants: The 2009 Election and the Changing Party System’’ (German Politics and Society, 2010). In 2005 the president of the Federal Republic awarded him the Merit Cross of the Federal Republic of Germany for his body of work.Alan Convery is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Edinburgh. His research focus-es on UK and Scottish politics and conservatism and the Conservative Party. He is the author of The Territorial Conservative Party: Devolution and Party Change in Scotland and Wales (2016). He was Deputy Editor (2015-2018) and Lead Editor (2018-2021) of the British Journal of Politics and International Relations. At Edinburgh, he organises the Introduction to British Politics course and received the Chancellor’s Award for Teaching in 2019. Since 2010 he has been Visiting Professor in the School of Government at the LUISS University in Rome and teaches in the field of European public policy. Previously he was a member of the European Institute at the London School of Economics (1991-2010) and held the position of Director General in the Regional Government of Sicily (2008.2009) responsible for the Structural Funds and extra-regional affairs. He has served as a founding member and past president of the Conference Group on Italian Politics and Society and is a current member of the British Academy of the Social Sciences. Raffaella Y. Nanetti is professor of urban planning and policy (UPP) in the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, University of Illinois at Chicago, having served as the UPP director in the 1990s at the time of the creation of the new College. She was a member, with Robert D. Putnam and Robert Leonardi, of the study team that carried out the twenty-year longitudinal study of Italian regional and local institutions from which the concept of “social capital” was empirically derived (Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, 1992). Since the mid-1990s she has worked on the application of the concept of social capital to the field of urban planning, focusing on social capital–building strategies to improve institutional performance and to promote and sustain local and regional development.
