G. Bingham Powell, Jr. is Marie C. and Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester. His current research focuses on democratic elections and political representation in legislatures and governments. He is the author of the prize-winning books Elections as Instruments of Democracy: Majoritarian and Proportional Visions (Yale University Press 2000) and Contemporary Democracies: Participation, Stability and Violence (Harvard University Press 1982.) In 2011–2012 he was President of the American Political Science Association.Kaare W. Strøm is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. Strøm's interests include political parties, coalition theory, European politics, and the institutions of parliamentary democracy. He is the author of Minority Government and Majority Rule; co-editor of Challenges to Political Parties, Policy, Office or Votes?, Coalition Governments in Western Europe, Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies, and the textbook Comparative Politics Today: A World View. He has received the American Political Science Association's Franklin Burdette Pi Sigma Alpha Award for best conference paper (1983), the Gabriel Almond Award for best dissertation in Comparative Politics (1984), and UNESCO's Sixth Stein Rokkan Prize in Comparative Social Science Research (1994). He has also served on the National Science Foundation political science panel and on the editorial boards of a number of leading academic journals in the US and Europe. Strøm was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Rochester in 1988 and a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace in 1994–95. In 2001, he was a Fellow at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy. Between 2002 and 2004 he was Study Center Director of the University of California's Education Abroad Program in Scandinavia. Strøm is a 2004–05 Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He is a Fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Arts and Sciences and also a Fellow of the Royal Norwegian Society of Science and Letters.Melanie Manion is Vor Broker Family Professor of Political Science at Duke University. Her research focuses on contemporary authoritarianism, with empirical work on bureaucracy, corruption, information, and representation in China. She is the recipient of numerous research awards, including awards from the National Science Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and American Council of Learned Societies. Her newest book, Information for Autocrats (Cambridge University Press, 2015), examines representation in Chinese local congresses. Previous publications include Retirement of Revolutionaries in China (Princeton University Press, 1993), Corruption by Design (Harvard University Press, 2004), and Chinese Politics: New Sources, Methods, and Field Strategies (edited with Allen Carlson, Mary Gallagher, and Kenneth Lieberthal, Cambridge University Press, 2010). Her articles have appeared in journals including American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, and China Quarterly.Russell J. Dalton is a Research Professor at the Center for the Study of Democracy at UC Irvine. His research focuses on the role of citizens in the democratic process, involving the topics of political culture, electoral politics, and political representation. Dalton’s most recent books include Political Realignment – Economics, Culture and Electoral Change (2018), The Participation Gap (2017), The Civic Culture Transformed (2015), and The Good Citizen, 2nd Edition (2015). He is also co-editor of Comparative Politics Today, 12th Edition (Pearson 2017) and special issues of Asian Journal of Comparative Politics (2017) and Environmental Politics (2015). He has received a Fulbright Professorship at the University of Mannheim, a Barbra Streisand Center fellowship, German Marshall Research Fellowship and a POSCO Fellowship at the East/West Center.
