Political Culture Research Professor
Leuphana University in Lueneburg,
Germany

Speech title:
A Psychological Theory of Autocracy-vs-Democracy

Member of the German Academy of Sciences, Christian Welzel (cwelzel@gmail.com) is the Political Culture Research Professor at Leuphana University in Lueneburg, Germany. He is also President (emer.) and Vice-President of the World Values Survey Association and Chief Foreign Director of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR) at the National Research University-Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Russia.

Welzel’s research focuses on human empowerment, emancipative values, cultural change and democratization. Recipient of multiple large-scale grants, Welzel is the author of more than a hundred-and-fifty scholarly publications. Besides his award-winning Freedom Rising (2013 at CUP, winner of the Alexander George Award and the Stein Rokkan Prize), the most recent books include Democratization (with Christian Haerpfer, Ronald Inglehart and Patrick Bernhagen, 2^nd efully revised and updated edition at OUP 2019), The Civic Culture Transformed (with Russell J. Dalton, at CUP 2014); and Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy (with Ronald Inglehart, 2005 at CUP). Funded by the German Science Foundation’s Reinhard Koselleck Award, Welzel currently directs research on the project “The Cool Water Effect: The Geo-Climatic Origin of Western Civilization’s Emancipatory Dynamic.”