Professor Kollman will provide a historical and analytical analysis of the Electoral College, an institution that was created through the U.S. Constitution. He will review the origins of this curious institution and will discuss the pros and cons of its continued use.
Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of Political Science
Director and Research Professor, Center for Political Studies
University of Michigan
Ken Kollman is the Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor and Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. He is also Research Professor at the Center for Political Studies (Institute for Social Research) at the university.
His recent book, coauthored with John Jackson, Dynamic Partisanship: How and Why Voter Loyalties Change, published by University of Chicago Press, includes detailed analysis of data from the United States, Australia, Canada, and the U.K. His previous book, Perils of Centralization, published by Cambridge University Press, includes research on the European Union, the Roman Catholic Church, General Motors Corporation, and the United States government. Throughout his career he has contributed in diverse fields: computational social science, comparative and American politics, European Union studies, comparative federalism, and comparative political parties and elections. His popular American government textbook with W.W. Norton is now in its third edition. The New York Times and Washington Post have published his essays. He created and administered a new minor and major in international studies at the University of Michigan. The major has grown into one of the largest at the university. He co-founded and is co-principal investigator of the Constituency-Level Election Archive (CLEA), which is the world’s largest repository of elections results data.