Dr Seán Hanley

Senior Lecturer in East European Politics

Email
s.hanley@ssees.ucl.ac.uk

Phone Number
020 7679 8818

Fax
020 7679 8777

I studied Russian and French at the University of Leeds and worked in Russia and the Czech Republic as a teacher of English and technical translator before returning to the UK to complete a Masters in Russian and East European Studies and a PhD at the University of Birmingham. My PhD thesis dealt with the role played by political norms in the emergence and consolidation of political parties in the Czech Republic.

I joined SSEES in 2003 as Lecturer in East European Politics, having previously worked as Lecturer in Politics in at Brunel University, West London. Having initially been interested in Soviet and post-Soviet Politics as a student, my intellectual interests later shifted towards the more rapidly consolidating democracies of Central and Eastern Europe.

Research Interests
My principal research interests are the politics of the Czech Republic, the formation and organization of political parties (and alternatives to parties); institutional theory; the politics of the centre-right in Central and Eastern Europe; euroscepticism; comparative democratization; the political representation of older people in Central and Eastern Europe.

I have published on these topics for both academic and other journals. My most recent publications include a working paper on the comparative success of centre-right parties in Central and Eastern Europe (written in collaboration with colleagues at the universities of Sussex and Birmingham) and a book examining the development of the Czech centre-right entitled The New Right in the New Europe: Czech transformation and right-wing politics, 1989-2006 (RoutledgeCurzon, 2007). A fuller list of publications can be found by clicking on the link at the foot of this page.

I am currently working on research papers on pensioners' parties and groupings in Central and Eastern Europe, the relationship of Greens and the centre-right in the Czech Republic and the place of East Central Europe in European comparative politics.

Teaching and supervision
I teach or contribute to a number of courses in politics and the social sciences: Politics of Transition and Integration in Central and Eastern Europe (MA); Democracy and the Fall of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe (MA); Theory and Practice of Social Research (MA); Advanced Qualitative Methods (MA); Comparative Politics (BA); Democracy and Democratization (BA).

I am currently supervising four MPhil/PhD students working on:

• Youth politics and the right in Hungary
• 'Ethnobusiness' and minority participation in Romania
• Social and environmental movements in Bulgaria and Romania
• The impact of Europeanization on the success of radical-right populist parties in Central and Eastern Europe

Recent Publications

Other

• Supplementary material to my paper on Dynamics of Czech New Party Formation

This page last modified Wednesday 15 June 2011.