Contact Details

• Tel: +44 (0)116 252 2713
• Fax: +44 (0)116 252 5082
• Email: kh10@leicester.ac.uk

Research Interests

My major interest is in post-communist democratisation processes, and I have specialised in the domestic politics of Slovakia and the Czech Republic. However, I am also familiar with the functioning of the communist systems, having travelled widely in Eastern Europe since the 1970s, and spent a semester in (then) Leningrad as a student in the 1970s, and a year as a British Council scholar in Czechoslovakia in 1987-88. In the mid-1990s, I developed research into EU eastern enlargement, with a particular focus on the influence of the enlargement process on domestic politics within the candidate states.

Curriculum Vitae

Current Research

I am continuing research into attitudes toward the EU both in Slovakia and in the candidate states as a whole, with a particular focus on political parties. I am currently writing books on The Politics of Slovakia: Voters, Parties and Democracy 1989-2010 and The EU's New Democracies, to be published by Routledge.

I lead the Department’s Jean Monnet project ‘EU Enlargement and Democratic Consolidation in Central and Eastern Europe’, which began in September 2010.

Recent Research Activities

I currently chair the European Science Foundation’s ‘Forward Look’ on Central and Eastern Europe Beyond Transition: Convergence and Divergence in Europe, which focuses on setting a medium-term agenda for social science research on Central and Eastern Europe. Further Information: Webpage

I was awarded a Leverhulme Study Abroad Fellowship to study 'Teaching and Researching Europeanisation' at Comenius University Bratislava for a semester in 2008.

PhD Supervision

My particular research interests are in post-communist democratisation and party systems in Central and Eastern Europe, and I lead a Jean Monnet project on EU Enlargement and Democratic Consolidation in Central and Eastern Europe. I am happy to supervise students working on domestic politics in Central and Europe, on issues concerning EU enlargement including the ENP area, and on democratisation in general. I can speak Slovak, German, Czech, Russian and French, and a full list of my publications can be found above.  Any potential research student who would like to discuss a project idea with me prior to applying to the Department is welcome to contact me by e-mail at any time.

I would particularly welcome research students interested in looking at the Europeanisation of party systems in Central and Eastern Europe. My own work in this respect has focused on Slovakia, and there is scope both to extend this work and to look comparatively at linked issues in current candidate, potential candidate and Eastern Partnership states. I would also be very interested in supervising research on party political attitudes to issues of ethnic minorities and migration policy making in the new EU member states.

Theses currently supervised:

• ‘Complex Regionalisation in the Wider Black Sea Area’ (Mukhtar Hajizada) 
•  ‘Democratisation in Armenia and the ENP’ (Inna Hakobyan)
• ‘Local Government and Democracy in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’ (Pembe Toluk)

Completed theses recently supervised:

• ‘Black Sea or Black Lake? How US-Russian tensions have affected EU policies in the wider Black Sea region’ (Carol Weaver, PhD awarded 2011)
• ‘The Importance of Political Institutions for the Economic Development of China, 1992-2004’ (Yanan Jiang, PhD awarded 2010)

Teaching

I am responsible for the department's undergraduate and MA teaching on Russian and East Central European politics. Modules currently taught are:

• PL3057 Communism in Eastern Europe
• PL3058 The Democratisation of East Central Europe
• PL7087  EU Enlargement and Democratic Consolidation in Post-Communist Europe
• PL7587 EU Enlargement and Democratic Consolidation in Post-Communist Europe (by Distance Learning)

Most Recent Publications

Books

The Black Sea and EU Policy: The Challenge of Divergent Agendas (editor, with Carol Weaver), (London: Ashgate, 2010) 

The Area of Freedom, Security and Justice in the New Europe (editor) (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005)

Slovakia: Escape from Invisibility (London: Routledge, 2002)

Back to Europe: Central and Eastern Europe and the European Union (editor) (London: UCL Press, 1999)

Post-Communist Politics: An Introduction with Neil Robinson (London: Prentice Hall, 1997)

Book Chapters

• ‘Slovakia: Beyond the passive consensus on the EU’, in R. Harmsen & J. Schild (eds), Debating Europe: The 2009 European Parliament Elections and Beyond (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2011), pp.  
• ‘Slovakia’, in W. Gagatek (ed.) The 2009 Elections to the European Parliament Country Reports (Florence: EUI, 2010), pp. 155-66.
• ‘Czech Republic and Slovakia: party politics and the travails of ratification’, in M. Carbone (ed.), National Politics and European Integration: from the Constitution to the Lisbon Treaty (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2010), pp. 197-214.
• ‘Evropeizace politických stran na Slovensku’ (‘The Europeanisation of political parties in Slovakia’), in P. Fiala et al., Evropeizace zajmu (Brno: Masaryk University, 2009), pp. 193-209.
• ‘The Slovak Republic: eurosceptics and phoney europhiles’ in A. Szczerbiak & P. Taggart (eds), The Comparative Party Politics of Euroscepticism, Vol. 1, Case Studies and Country Surveys (Oxford: OUP, 2008), pp. 103-26.
• ‘Exceptionalism or convergence?  Euroscepticism and party systems in Central and Eastern Europe’ in A. Szczerbiak & P. Taggart (eds), The Comparative Party Politics of Euroscepticism, Vol. 2, Comparative and Theoretical Perspectives (Oxford: OUP, 2008), pp. 277-94.

Recent Journal Articles

• ‘Between Euroscepticism and Eurosupport: the attituudes of urban and rural populations in Poland 2000-2008’ (with I. Surwillo & G. Lazaridis) in Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 62, No. 9,  2010, pp. 1503-25.

• ‘Europeanization of Political Parties: Redefining Concepts in a United Europe’, in Slovak Sociological Review, Vo. 41, No. 6, pp. 526-38.

• ‘Political Developments in the EU Member States’ (with Nick Sitter), The JCMS Annual Review of the European Union in 2007, 2008, pp. 183-213.

• 'The Slovak Republic: Explaining defects in democracy' (2004) Democratization Vol. 11, No. 5 (2004).

• 'EU Accession and the New Slovak Consensus' West European Politics, Vol. 27, No. 4 (2004), pp. 652-70.

Working papers available on the web

• Europe and the Slovak Parliamentary Election of June 2010, Election Briefing No. 28 (Brighton: University of Sussex 2006), http://www.sussex.ac.uk/sei/documents/no_58_epernslovakia2010.pdf, pp. 1-12.
• The European Parliament Election in Slovakia, 6 June 2009, European Parliament Election Briefing No. 44 (Brighton: University of Sussex, 2009), http://www.sussex.ac.uk/sei/documents/no_44_epernep2009slovakia.pdf, pp. 1-13.
• The Slovak Parliamentary Election of June 2006, Election Briefing No. 26 (Brighton: University of Sussex, 2006), http://www.sussex.ac.uk/sei/documents/epern.pdf, pp. 1-15.