HSE Professor Christian Welzel awarded 2014 Stein Rokkan Prize

Christian Welzel, leading professor at the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR) HSE St Petersburg received the 2014 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research in recognition of his book «Freedom Rising: Human Empowerment and the Quest for Emancipation»
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At the ceremony the jury declared, ‘The prize winner has set himself an ambitious task: to study the progress of universal freedoms through the conceptual and empirical lenses of a comparative analysis of the role of emancipative values in rich and poor countries. He seeks to identify the sources of emancipative values; to demonstrate their quality as a fundamental civic force and as a key propellant of pro-democratic impulses... Christian Welzel has succeeded in his ambition. His book is a piece of scholarship that constitutes — in empirical, conceptual, theoretical and methodological terms — a very ‘substantial and original contribution in comparative social science research.’

On the Cambridge University Press website Russell J. Dalton of the University of California, Irvine welcomes Welzel’s book with a warm review,

‘Freedom Rising is a singularly impressive study of how social modernisation can transform societies and their citizens. Welzel marshals data from the World Values Survey to support his human empowerment model with an impressive store of empirical evidence. This is likely to be the decade’s most important book on political development and political culture’

Christian Welzel is teaching Human Empowerment: The Co-Evolution of Rights and Culture in the 1st module year 2014/2015 within the Master in Comparative Social Research program at HSE Moscow.

Source: http://www.hse.ru/en/news/research/130236019.html