Faculty

Christopher J. Anderson is a Professor in the Department of Government and Director of the Cornell Institute for European Studies. He also is currently a team member of the Persistent Poverty and Upward Mobility project at Cornell’s Institute for the Social Sciences and the international collaborative project on Making Electoral Democracy Work funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Anderson’s research focuses on inequality and legitimacy in the European Union and the OECD countries. He has written on such issues as the popularity of governments, the legitimacy of political institutions, and the link between welfare states and citizen behavior. His most recent books are Losers’ Consent: Elections and Democratic Legitimacy (Oxford University Press; with André Blais, Shaun Bowler, Todd Donovan, and Ola Listhaug), and Democracy, Inequality, and Representation: A Comparative Perspective (Russell Sage Foundation; with Pablo Beramendi).

Anderson is the recipient of a number of awards, including the American Political Science Association’s Heinz Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the Best Article Award from the Journal of Politics, and the Emerging Scholar Award from the APSA Section on Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior. He has served as President of the American Political Science Association’s Section on European Politics and Society, and on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies, European Union Politics, and the Journal of Politics. A native of Germany, he studied political science at the University of Cologne, Virginia Tech, and Washington University in St.Louis, where he received his PhD.