Jan-Erik Lane

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Jan-Erik Lane is professor of comparative politics at the University of Geneva. He is member of many editorial boards of political science journals. He has published some 250 books and articles. At Geneva university he teaches around 1000 students a year at all levels, from 1st year to PhD. He has done contributions to N-person game theory (power indices), voter volatility, comparative democracy theory and the principal-agent approach to public administration. Recently, he has published with Florent Dieterlen (Univ of Lausanne) a global Hubbert curve for oil production. He has been visiting professor at several universities in the US and Asia, receiving a Lady Davis professorship at the Hebrew University in 2006. He looks upon politics as a succession of principal-agent games, starting with the electoral contract, i.e. of voting in a new national assembly and government in order to end up in the setting up of implementation agencies working under a contract with government. Thus, politics is basically contracting, which raises the issues of consideration and quid pro quo, which issues tend to be resolved differently in democracies on the one hand and authoritarian regimes on the other hand. Yet, all politics involves contractual opacity and the serious risk of a mismatch between promises and outcomes, due to the long intertemporal nature of the electoral or administrative contracts. His most recent work includes an evolutionary theory of political regimes as well as an article upon the economic convergence in the EU land.

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