Ken Kollman

Biography

Ken Kollman is the William M. Scholl Professor of Politics at the University of Notre Dame. He is a professor in the College of Arts & Letters’ Department of Political Science and in the Keough School of Global Affairs.

Kollman’s research spans American and comparative politics. He is currently researching political parties and elections, and advancing methods for studying voters’ perceptions of parties. His recent book, coauthored with John Jackson, Dynamic Partisanship: How and Why Voter Loyalties Change, published by University of Chicago Press, includes detailed analysis of data from the United States, Australia, Canada, and the U.K. His previous book, Perils of Centralization, published by Cambridge University Press, includes research on the European Union, the Roman Catholic Church, General Motors Corporation, and the United States government. He is completing a new book on political parties, under contract (conditional) for Princeton University Press.

Throughout his career he has contributed in diverse fields: computational social science, comparative and American politics, European Union studies, comparative federalism, and comparative political parties and elections. The New York Times and Washington Post have published his essays. Among other data projects, he co-founded and is co-principal investigator of the Constituency-Level Election Archive (CLEA), which is the world’s largest repository of elections results data. He has received numerous awards, including the Samuel Eldersveld Career Achievement Award in 2024 from the from the Political Organizations and Parties section of the American Political Science Association.

He will begin his role as Director of Notre Dame’s Democracy Initiative in January, 2027.