Dr. Kevin Deegan-Krause promoted to professor

Picture of Kevin Deegan-KrauseKevin Deegan-Krause has been promoted to the rank of professor, as of the 2021-22 academic year. Deegan-Krause joined the Department of Political Science as an instructor in 1999 and was promoted to assistant professor in 2000, following the receipt of his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. He was promoted to associate professor with tenure at Wayne State in 2006. His major field of study is comparative politics, with areas of specialization in European politics and democratization.

Among Deegan-Krause's numerous awards are the WSU Board of Governors Faculty Recognition Award, a Fulbright Research Scholarship for Slovakia, a WSU Career Development Chair Award and induction into the Wayne State University Academy of Teachers.

Cover of Deegan-Krause's book titled The New Party ChallengeDeegan-Krause has held appointments as visiting scholar at Comenius University, Department of Politics, Bratislava, Slovakia; the Sociological Institute, Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic; and the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, Södertörns högskola/University College, Stockholm, Sweden. He has published, in addition to an exceptionally large number of refereed journal articles and chapters in edited collections, two widely hailed books: Elected Affinities: Democracy and Party Competition in Slovakia and the Czech Republic (Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press, 2006) and (with co-author Tim Haughton) The New Party Challenge: Changing Cycles of Party Birth and Death in Central Europe and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

Elected Affinities represented years of research and presented an empirical examination and comparison of the transition to democracy in two states created by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The data-based study moved Deegan-Krause to the forefront of a group of scholars working in the area of European democratic transitions. The New Party Challenge: Changing Cycles of Party Birth and Death in Central Europe and Beyond presents a comparative analysis of the births, trajectories and, in some cases, deaths of political parties in eleven European states. This path-breaking study provides answers to such questions as, what are the causes behind the rise of new political parties, why do some parties endure while others quickly die and what factors explain the stability or instability of party systems across multiple states? As Deegan-Krause and Haughton developed their thesis and gathered data, they realized that political phenomena in states outside of the Central European countries that constituted the focal point of their analysis seemed to be exhibiting similar patterns, notably in Spain, Italy, Greece, Iceland and the Netherlands, but also in Latin America and East Asia. The extension of the implications to states beyond Central Europe has a major impact on understanding democratic development in the broadest perspective of the field of comparative politics.

Deegan-Krause is also the author or co-author of 13 articles in refereed journals and author or co-author of 16 chapters in edited books. He has served as co-editor of the Political Data Yearbook for the European Journal of Political Research, which has seen seven editions published since 2011.

This exceptionally large body of significant research has established Deegan-Krause as an internationally recognized scholar in the field of comparative politics. His work in the areas of Central and Eastern European politics, democratization and party politics constitutes the leading edge of research in these areas of specialization.

← Back to listing