Herbert Kitschelt

Who is Herbert Kitschelt?

Herbert P. Kitschelt is a political science scholar and George V. Allen Professor of International Relations at Duke University, North Carolina. Kitschelt's key intellectual contribution is arguably his redefinition of the competitive space for political parties in Western Europe. Kitschelt claims that the traditional patterns along which parties competed had progressively shifted to a new pattern of political division: left-libertarian versus right-authoritarian as a result of social changes in advanced capitalist societies. He was also one of the first scholars to systematically study the rise of Green parties in Europe, which he understood as a form of 'left-libertarian' politics. With co-authors he has also explained the rise of the new radical right parties in Europe, in light of this shift and studied the formation of party systems in post-communist democracies. In respect to Eastern Europe, Kitschelt argues that patterns of party competition in post-communist states - and the extent to which they are structured in programmatic terms- are produced by legacies of different forms of communist rule, which in turn reflect pre-communist social and state structures.