Researchers

Michael L. Smith is a Researcher at the Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, where he leads the Center of Excellence “Dynamics of Change in Czech Society” research team developing the Czech Household Panel Study. He was previously a Researcher in the departments of economic sociology and social stratification at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He received B.A. degrees from the University of Washington in Seattle (1998), M.A. from Boston College (2000), and his PhD in Political Science (2008) from the New School for Social Research in New York, where he also received the Hannah Arendt Prize for Best Dissertation. During his studies he was a David L. Boren Fellow, a Jacob K. Javits Fellow, an IREX fellow, and a short-term scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is also a Researcher at the think-tank Institute for Social and Economic Analyses (ISEA) and a Lecturer at the University of Washington. He led the team creating www.politickefinance.cz, the database of Czech political party financing. He serves as a member of the editorial board of the journal Social Forces, as a member of the ECPR steering committee on Democratic Innovations, was a guest editor for the Czech Sociological Review, and has helped implement ISSP and other surveys in the Czech Republic.

Research Orientation:

Education and educational inequality, social stratification, lobbying, party finance, democratic governance, interdisciplinary approaches to the social sciences