Marcus Kreuzer is Professor of Political Science at Villanova University. He has worked on the origins and historical transformation of political parties and democratic institutions in nineteenth and early twentieth century Western Europe and post-communist Eastern Europe. More recently, his research explores how the historical perspective social scientists choose shapes the world they theoretically construct, what questions they ask, what evidence they see, and what explanations they eventually discover. His research project, “Longue Durée Analysis: Elongating Time to Explore Macro-Historical Questions,” explores under what conditions notions of natural history, borrowed from evolutionary biology, demographics, and geology, are appropriate for analyzing long-run, socio-political phenomena.

Marcus Kreuzer is author of two books, Institutions and Innovations: Voters, Parties, and Interest Groups in the Consolidation of Democracy: France and Germany, 1870-1939 and The Grammar of Time: A Toolkit for Comparative Historical Analysis (2023), as well as numerous articles exploring how the historical thinking employed by historians can enrich the more static, context-free, and ultimately quantitative thinking championed in more mainstream social science.

Professor Kreuzer has been visiting professor at several European universities, teaches comparative historical methodology at the Institute for Qualitative Multi-Method Research, the European Consortium for Political Research, and MethodsNet. He serves on the advisory board of the Qualitative Date Repository and the Executive Council of the Politics and History section of the American Political Science Association. He was a fellow at the Institute of Human Studies (Vienna) and his research was supported by the Open Society Fund. His articles have won several best paper prizes.