Faculty Profile

Ken Kollman is Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor Emeritus and Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan.  He is also Emeritus Research Professor at the Center for Political Studies (Institute for Social Research) at the university.   He is on leave for academic year 2025-26, writing a book on political parties.

As of January 1, 2026 he is appointed on faculty at the University of Notre Dame.

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. The New York Times and Washington Post have published his essays.  He co-founded and is co-principal investigator of the Constituency-Level Election Archive (CLEA), now known as the Elections Archive (THEA), which is the world’s largest repository of elections results data.