Stein Rokkan

Stein Rokkan (July 4, 1921 – July 22, 1979) was a Norwegian political scientist and sociologist.

He was the first professor of sociology at the University of Bergen and a principal founder of the discipline of comparative politics.

He founded the multidisciplinary Department of Sociology at the University of Bergen, which encompassed sociology, economics and political science and which had a key role in the postwar development of the social sciences in Norway.

Stein Rokkan was born on the Lofoten archipelago in the far north of Norway and raised in the nearby town of Narvik.

Rokkan completed his gymnasium years in 1939, and he received a magister artium in political philosophy from the University of Oslo in 1948.

Rokkan's studies were interrupted in 1943 when the German occupation closed the University of Oslo and he returned to the university after the liberation in 1945.

In the United States, Rokkan was a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at Columbia and Chicago from 1948 to 1950.

At Columbia University, his work with Paul Lazarsfeld acquainted him with modern social research methods.

At the London School of Economics, he met T. H. Marshall.

Rokkan then turned to empirical research, and studied at Columbia University, Chicago and the London School of Economics between 1949 and 1951.

He subsequently worked at the Norwegian Institute for Social Research (ISF) from 1951 until 1957, and moved to Bergen in 1958, where he worked at the Chr.

Michelsen Institute from 1958 to 1966.

Rokkan co-founded, with Shmuel Eisenstadt, Morris Janowitz, and Seymour Martin Lipset, the Committee on Political Sociology (CPS) of the International Sociological Association (ISA) in 1960 and served as its secretary from 1960 to 1970.

Peter Flora notes that the "initial analysis of the origins of cleavage structures and their transformation into party systems appeared in 1965 ... in German" in a version that "carried Rokkan's name alone."

In 1966 he became Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bergen.

Over the years Rokkan was three times a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a visiting professor at various universities (Manchester, Stanford, Geneva, the London School of Economics, the Instituts d'études politiques in Paris. He also held a permanent appointment as Visiting Professor at Yale University.

He was vice-president of the International Sociological Association from 1966 to 1970; president of the International Political Science Association from 1970 to 1973; chairman (from 1970 to 1976) and co-founder of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR); and president of the International Social Science Council (ISSC), which was founded by UNESCO, from 1973 to 1977.

Rokkan received many awards.

He was a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, an international member of the American Philosophical Society, and a member of the Finnish and Norwegian Academies of Sciences.

Rokkan's work "Norway: Numerical Democracy and Corporate Pluralism" (1966) was selected for the Norwegian Sociology Canon in 2009–2011 as one of 25 works that "had the greatest influence on sociology in Norway."Norwegian Sociology Canon

After focusing on individual voters, he turned his attention to the study of politics, especially the formation of political parties and European nation-states.

Peter Flora's overview of Rokkan's oeuvre points out that the "unity of Rokkan work stems from his constant concern with the European nation-state and its democratization."

In this 1967 co-authored work with Seymour Martin Lipset, Rokkan introduced critical juncture theory and made a substantial contributions to cleavage theory.

Seymour Lipset and Stein Rokkan (1967) and Rokkan (1970) introduced the idea that big discontinuous changes, such as the reformation, the building of nations, and the industrial revolution, reflected conflicts organized around social cleavages, such as the center-periphery, state-church, land-industry, and owner-worker cleavages.

In turn, these big discontinuous changes could be seen as critical junctures because they generated social outcomes that subsequently remained "frozen" for extensive periods of time.

In more general terms, Lipset and Rokkan's model has three components:

In this 1968 article, Rokkan elabores the idea that a process of democratization has to overcome four institutional thresholds:

He received honorary degrees from the University of Uppsala in 1970, the University of Helsinki in 1971, and the University of Geneva and the University of Aarhus in 1979.

Rokkan (1970) added two points to these ideas.

Critical junctures could set countries on divergent or convergent paths.

Critical junctures could be "sequential," such that a new critical junctures does not totally erase the legacies of a previous critical juncture but rather modifies that previous legacy.

During the 1970s, Rokkan worked on the development of conceptual maps of Europe.

These maps were presented in several chapters.

These conceptual maps summarized the principles of geopolitical differentiation within Europe.

Tilly remarks that these conceptual maps "cast new light on an old paradox: the fact that capitalism and national states grew up together, and presumably depended on each other in some way, yet capitalists and centers of capital accumulation often offered concerted resistance to the extension of state power."

Rokkan has been described as "one of the world's leading social scientists since World War II", "one of the great masters of comparative politics", and "a leading international scholar during the second phase of the post-war social science with its foci on macro studies and international comparisons."

Rokkan has also been described as "one of the world's foremost researchers on elections" and "Norway's most influential social scientist of all times."

He influenced thinking about cleavage, comparative history, party systems and Catalan nationalism, among other topics.

He helped launch a research tradition on critical junctures.

Rokkan was the creator of a series of models for state and nation formations in Europe.