Michael Coppedge

Michael Coppedge is professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, where he is a faculty fellow of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. His research interests include democratization and the quality of democracy; Latin American parties and party systems; Venezuelan politics; and comparative politics methodology. He has been a Kellogg Institute faculty fellow since 1995.

Coppedge is one of the principal investigators for the Varieties of Democracy project (V-Dem), which has measured hundreds of attributes of democracy and governance for most countries since 1900 and won the APSA Comparative Politics Section's 2016 “Best Dataset” prize. He argues for the complementarity of large- and small-sample research and qualitative and quantitative methods and is now using V-Dem data to analyze dimensions of democracy and the diffusion of democracy.

The author of Democratization and Research Methods (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Strong Parties and Lame Ducks: Presidential Partyarchy and Factionalism in Venezuela (Stanford, 1994), he has published numerous articles in journals such as the Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Party Politics, and in various books.

Coppedge, who holds a PhD from Yale University, taught at Johns Hopkins-SAIS, Princeton University, and Yale before coming to Notre Dame.