Dr Matt Qvortrup is an internationally recognized political scientist with a strong presence in the world of practice. Described by the BBC as ‘the world’s leading expert on referendums”, he has specialized in European Affairs, populism and democracy, most recently in his BBC program ‘How to Kill a Democracy’. Currently Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Coventry University and visiting professor of Political Theory at the American University of Rome, Matt earned his doctorate in politics from Brasenose College, Oxford University, and holds a qualification as a lawyer from the University of Law, London.
The winner of the Oxford University Press Law Prize 2012 for his research on referendums, he was also awarded the BJPIR Prize by the Political Studies Association in 2013 for his work on European political institutions. He has won funding from research councils, including the ESRC, as well as consultancies from national and international bodies. During 2015, he was a consultant to the House of Commons Constitutional Affairs and Public Administration Committee, and he was chief researcher for the Papua New Guinea National Research Institute study of referendums, and he is currently holder of a grant from the Westminster Foundation of Democracy, on the conduct of referendums in the age of populism.
Joint Editor of the top-academic journal European Political Science Review since 2016, he has published more than 50 academic articles in prestigious outlets, including Journal of Democracy, European Journal of Political Research, Government and Opposition, and Political Studies and he has written more than a dozen books on various aspects of Comparative and European politics. In addition to his academic work, Professor Qvortrup has writes op-eds for The Guardian, The New Statesman, El Pais, Bloomberg, Foreign Policy and the LA Times. He is the author of the acclaimed biography Angela Merkel: Europe’s Most Influential Leader (Duckworth - Overlook 2016), which has been translated into Chinese, Russian, Korean, Czech and Bulgarian. Earlier in his career, Professor Qvortrup was a senior civil servant in the British Home Office. In his spare time he writes film reviews for the magazine Philosophy Now.
