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Ronald and Eileen Weiser Professor of European
and Eurasian Studies

• Affiliation(s)

  • Director, Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies and Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia

• Fields of Study

  • Comparative Politics
  • Political Development
  • Methods

• About

  Anna Grzymala-Busse is a professor in the Political Science Department.  She focuses on religion and politics, informal politics, and post-communist state development.  Her first book, Redeeming the Communist Past, examined how discredited communist parties reinvented themselves as successful democrats. Her second book, Rebuilding Leviathan: Party Competition and State Exploitation in Post-Communist Democracies (2007) won the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Ed A. Hewett Prize for best publication on the political economy of the former Soviet Union and East Central Europe.  The book analyzed why some governing parties, constrained by strong political competition, limited their opportunistic behavior in rebuilding the post-communist state. Her current book project asks why and how organized religion influences public policy, and why we see such differences in church influence even among countries that are otherwise very similar in their religious profiles. 

  Prior to joining the faculty at Michigan, Professor Grzymala-Busse taught at Yale University’s Department of Political Science.   

• Education

  • Harvard University, Ph.D. with distinction (Government)
  • Cambridge University, M.Phil (Social and Political Studies)
  • Princeton University, A.B. with honors (Public and International Affairs)

• Awards

  • Religious Influence on Politics
  • Informal Institutions in Comparative Politics

• Grants

  • NCEEER Policy Research Fellowship Grant for Public Opinion Research (2003)
  • ISPS Grant for Public Opinion Research in Poland, Czech Republic, and Slovakia (2003)
  • IREX Short-Term Grant (2003)

• Presentations

  • Churches as Political Actors in New(ish) Democracies (Council of Europeanists, 2012)
  • Informal Institutions and Post-Communist State Reform (Conference on Ruling Politics: The Formal and Informal Foundations of Power, 2011)
  • Legacies of Religion and Identity, and Post-Communist Political Influence (Conference on Communist Legacies, 2011)

• Courses Taught

  • Comparative Politics Pro-seminar
  • Authoritarian Regimes
  • Qualitative Methods

• Selected Publications:

• Books

  • (2007) Rebuilding Leviathan
  • (2002) Redeeming the Communist Past

• Articles

  • (2012) Why Comparative Politics Needs to take Reigion (More) Seriously, Annual Review of Political Science