Dirk Berg-Schlosser is professor emeritus at Philipps-University, Marburg/Germany. He has been awarded degrees of Dr. oec. publ. (Munich 1971); Dr. phil. habil. (Augsburg 1978), and Ph.D. (UC Berkeley 1979). He has been Director of the Institute of Political Science and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Marburg. He has done research and taught at the universities of Munich, Aachen, Augsburg, Eichstaett, Nairobi, Stellenbosch/South Africa and Berkeley. From 2003 to 2006 he was Chair of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), from 2006 to 2009 Vice-President of the International Political Science Association (IPSA). From 2010 to 2016 he has been founder and coordinator of the IPSA Summer Schools on Research Methods at the universities of Sao Paulo, Stellenbosch, Singapore, Ankara, Mexico City and St. Petersburg. His research interests include political culture, empirical democratic theory, development studies, comparative politics, and comparative methodology. He is a fellow of the "Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies" (STIAS) and a member of the "Transformation Research Unit" (TRU) at Stellenbosch University/South Africa. Major recent publications in English include: Democratization - the State of the Art, 2nd ed. 2007); International Encyclopedia of Political Science (8 vol., co-ed. with Bertrand Badie and Leonardo Morlino 2011); Mixed Methods in Comparative Politics (2012); Political Science - A Global Perspective (with Bertrand Badie and Leonardo Morlino, 2017).

Bertrand Badie is Emeritus Professor of political science and international relations at Sciences Po Paris. He published about thirty books about state, comparative politics and international relations. Among them, The Imported state (2000), The Diplomacy of Connivance (2012), Political science (with D. Berg-Schlosser and L.Morlino, 2016) Humiliation in International relations (2017), New perspectives on international order (2018). He co-edited the International Encyclopedia of political science (2011), with D.Berg-Schlosser and L.Morlino.

Leonardo Morlino is Emeritus Professor of Political Science and President of the International Research Center on Democracies and Democratizations at LUISS, Rome. He was President of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) (2009-12). He is the author of more than 40 books and more than 200 journal essays and book chapters published in English, French, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Chinese, Mongolian, and Japanese. His most recent books include: Equality, Freedom and Democracy. Europe After the Great Recession (Oxford, forthcoming), The Impact of Economic Crisis on South European Democracies (Palgrave, 2017), The quality of Democracy in Latin America (IDEA, 2016), Changes for Democracy (Oxford UP, 2011).