Michael Bratton

Michael Bratton is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and African Studies Center at Michigan State University. He is also a founder and Director (MSU) of the Afrobarometer, a collaborative, international, survey research project that measures public opinion on democracy, markets and civil society in 18 African countries. The Afrobarometer won an award for the best data set of 2004 from the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.

Professor Bratton received a Ph.D from Brandeis University and joined the MSU faculty in 1977. He has held a post-doctoral fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, served as a Program Officer with the Ford Foundation, and been a visiting scholar at the University of Natal (South Africa), the University of Zimbabwe, and Uppsala University (Sweden). In 2006, he will spend a semester at Oxford University.

Bratton’s main research and teaching interests are in comparative politics (democratization, social movements, public opinion) and policy studies (development policy, development administration, evaluation research). His current research focuses on public opinion in new democracies, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, but also in broad comparative perspective.

He is the author of sixty-five articles and book chapters including contributions to World Politics, The British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, The Journal of Democracy, and World Development. His latest books are Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective, with Nicolas van de Walle (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Public Opinion, Democracy and Market Reform in Africa, with Robert Mattes and E.Gyimah-Boadi (Cambridge University Press, 2005).