Michael J. Coppedge

Biography

Michael Coppedge is the Alfred C. DeCrane Jr. Professor of International Studies at the University of Notre Dame and a Faculty Fellow of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. He is also one of the principal investigators of the Varieties of Democracy project, which has produced new measures of hundreds of aspects of democracy and governance for nearly all countries since 1900 and dozens of countries since as early as 1789. He is co-editor (with Amanda Edgell, Carl Henrik Knutsen, and Staffan I. Lindberg) of Why Democracies Develop and Decline (Cambridge, 2022); the author of Democratization and Research Methods (Cambridge University Press, 2012); Strong Parties and Lame Ducks: Presidential Partyarchy and Factionalism in Venezuela (Stanford University Press, 1994); co-author of Varieties of Democracy: Measuring Two Centuries of Political Change (Cambridge University Press, 2020); and author of “Resilience and Disruption in Latin America’s Third Wave,” Special Issue of Democratization (forthcoming 2026) and dozens of other articles and chapters on democratization, research methods, and Latin American political parties and elections. His current research projects cover multimethod approaches, including AI, to understand the nature, causes, and consequences of democracy, especially democracy measurement and international influences on democracy.