Jason Wittenberg

Assistant Professor of Political Science

Email: witty@berkeley.edu
Phone: (510) 642-8407
Office Location: 732 Barrows
Office Hours: Tu 11-12
Fall 2008 Course: PS141C Politics and Government in Eastern Europe,
PS149B Dictatorship and Its Discontents ( Travers Course)

Positions

  • Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley. July, 2005-present.

  • Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin, Madison. September, 2000-June, 2005.

Degrees

  • Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Political Science, June, 1999.
    Committee: Suzanne Berger (Chair), James M. Snyder, Jr., and Grzegorz Ekiert.

  • M.A. The American University. International Affairs, December, 1988.

  • B.A. University of California, Berkeley. Physics, May, 1985.

View Professor Wittenberg's abbreviated CV in .pdf format.

Book

Crucibles of Political Loyalty: Church Institutions and Electoral Continuity in Hungary. Cambridge University Press, 2006.

This book investigates one of the oldest paradoxes in political science: why do mass political loyalties persist even amid prolonged social upheaval and disruptive economic development? Drawing on extensive archival research and an original database of election results, it explores the paradox of political persistence by examining Hungary’s often tortuous path from pre- to post-communism. It demonstrates how despite the many depredations of communism, the Roman Catholic and Calvinist Churches transmitted loyalties to parties of the Right. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Church resistance occurred not from above, but from below. Hemmed in and harassed by communist party cadres, parish priests and pastors employed a variety of ingenious tactics to ensure the continued survival of local church institutions. These institutions insulated their adherents from pressures to assimilate into the surrounding socialist milieu. Ultimately this led to political continuity between pre- and post-communism.

Reviewed in Political Psychology, April, 2008, Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 300-303. (PDF file).
Reviewed in Slavic Review, Winter 2007, Vol. 66, No. 4, pp. 747-748. (PDF file).
Reviewed in CPS, November 2007, Vol. 40, No. 11, pp. 1398-1402. (PDF file).
Reviewed in Perspectives on Politics, June, 2007, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 386-388. (PDF file).
Reviewed in Foreign Afffairs, January/February 2007. (HTML file).

Articles and Chapters

  • Did Ethnic Balance Matter? Elections in Interwar Poland (with Jeffrey S. Kopstein). Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, Vol. 24, Forthcoming 2008.

  • Failed Democratization (with M. Steven Fish). In Christian Haerpfer, Ronald Inglehart, and Christian Welzel (Eds.), Democratization in a Globalizing World. (London: Oxford University Press, Forthcoming 2008).

  • Who Voted Communist? Reconsidering the Social Bases of Radicalism in Interwar Poland (with Jeffrey S. Kopstein). Slavic Review Vol. 62, No. 1, Spring 2003.

  • An Easy and Accurate Regression Model for Multiparty Electoral Data (with Michael Tomz and Joshua A. Tucker). Political Analysis 10(1), Winter 2002, pp. 66-83.

  • Making the Most of Statistical Analyses: Improving Interpretation and Presentation. (with Gary King and Michael Tomz). American Journal of Political Science, Volume 44, No. 2, April 2000, 347-361.

  • The 1994 Hungarian Election in Historical Perspective. In Gábor Tóka and Zsolt Enyedi (Eds.), The 1994 Election to the Hungarian National Assembly. (Berlin: Sigma, 1999).

  • Path-Dependence, Competition, and Succession in the Dynamics of Scientific Revolution. (with John D. Sterman). Organization Science Volume 10, No. 3, May-June 1999, pp. 322-341.

  • On the Very Idea of a System Dynamics Model of Kuhnian Science. System Dynamics Review. Vol. 8, No. 1, Winter 1992. (This paper was controversial, generating three critical responses that were published in the same issue.)

Software

  • ei.RxC:Hierarchical Multinomial-Dirichlet Ecological Inference Model (with Ferdinand Alimadhi, Badri Narayan Bhaskar, and Olivia Lau). In Kosuke Imai, Gary King, and Olivia Lau, "Zelig: Everyone’s Statistical Software." Available at http://gking.harvard.edu/zelig, 2007.

  • Clarify: Software for Interpreting and Presenting Statistical Results (with Michael Tomz and Gary King). Journal of Statistical Software, Volume 9, Issue 1, 2003.(Winner of the 1999 APSA research software award.)

Work in Progress

  • How Similar Are They? Conceptual Ambiguities in the Study of Electoral Persistence.

  • Historical Legacies and Comparative Politics.

  • Does Familiarity Breed Contempt? Inter-Ethnic Contact and Support for Illiberal Parties. (with Jeffrey S. Kopstein)

  • The Logic of Civil Society in New Democracies. (Hungary, Poland, South Korea, and Taiwan). (with Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik).

Teaching

    University of California, Berkeley. Fall, 2005 - Present.

    • Politics and History in Eastern Europe. Undergraduate lecture

    • Quantitative Analysis in Political Research. Graduate lecture

    • Philosophy of Social Science. Graduate seminar

    • Authoritarianism. Graduate seminar

    • Dictatorship and its Discontents. Undergraduate lecture


    University of Wisconsin, Madison. Fall, 2000 - Spring, 2005.

    • Seminar on Post-Communist Politics. Graduate seminar

    • Introduction to Comparative Politics. Undergraduate lecture

    • Politics and Society: Contemporary Eastern Europe. Undergraduate lecture

    • Authoritarianism and Its Aftermath. Graduate seminar


















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Charles and Louise Travers
Department of Political Science
210 Barrows Hall
UC Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-1950

Phone: 642-6323
Fax: 642-9515
psfront@berkeley.edu