Dirk Berg-Schlosser has been professor and Director of the Institute of Political Science and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Philosophy, Philipps-University, Marburg/Germany. He has done research and taught at the universities of Munich, Aachen, Augsburg, Eichstaett, Nairobi, Stellenbosch/South Africa and Berkeley. From 1988 to 2000 he has been chairman of the Research Committee on "Democratization in Comparative Perspective" of the International Political Science Association (IPSA). From 2003 to 2006 he was Chair of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), from 2006 to 2009 Vice-President of IPSA. He is currently director of the IPSA Summer Schools on Research Methods at the universities of Sao Paulo , Singapore, and Ankara.His research interests include political culture, empirical democratic theory, Third World studies, comparative politics, and comparative methodology.