Jean Blondel obituary

Jean Blondel, who has died aged 93, was one of the founding fathers of modern political science. He transformed the comparative study of democratic political institutions through his research and many publications, and by his energetic development of the discipline throughout Europe. In both his intellectual and organisational endeavours, Blondel was a creative revolutionary.

In 1963, he published Voters, Parties and Leaders, a pioneering study of how public opinion, elections and party organisations together formed the input side of the British political system. The first to make extensive use of emerging survey data and participant observation research, it inspired the upcoming generation of academics recruited to the rapidly expanding political science departments of the 1960s to follow suit.

Blondel’s radically novel Introduction to Comparative Government was published in 1969. Until then, the established way of comparing structurally different political institutions, such as presidential as distinct from parliamentary governance, or two-party versus multi-party systems, was to undertake a detailed historical study of two or three countries, typically the US, Britain and France, and add occasional cross-references and insights.

However, Introduction to Comparative Government covered every independent country in the world – 150 of them – in a rigorous, systematic fashion, using comparable information about each country’s political institutions that he had painstakingly assembled from international organisations, Keesing’s Contemporary Archives and any other reputable source he could lay his hands on. He would skip from China to the Philippines to Austria in a single paragraph. Its underlying assumption was that the specific design of a political institution, such as an electoral system, or the committee structure of a legislature, operated in fundamentally the same way irrespective of country; the variations produced by distinctive national histories and cultures were incidental.

Through this book, Blondel defined and formalised the field of systematic comparative politics, ushering in a new way of analysing political institutions, which remains the predominant approach to this day. The aim was to establish regularities, laws and taxonomies, not particularities; the unit of analysis was the institution, or relations between institutions, not the country; the form of analysis was computer-driven statistical inference and modelling, not historical description. From Blondel’s hand there followed a steady stream of comparative studies of party systems, political leadership and governmental organisation for the rest of his life.

Born in Toulon, to Marie (nee Santelli) and Fernand Blondel, Jean went to the Jesuit school Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague, and the Lycée Henri IV, both in Paris. He then attended the Institut d’Études Politiques in the city, graduating in 1953, before a spell of field research in Brazil, and postgraduate study at St Antony’s College, Oxford. Incensed by the Gaullist takeover of France in 1958, he chose to remain in Britain.

After lectureships at Manchester and Keele universities, and a formative year at Yale, then at the forefront of the new behavioural political science, he was appointed in 1964, at the age of only 32, to the foundation chair of government in the new University of Essex. Offered the rare opportunity to build a large department from scratch, he created a recognisably world-class department in fewer than 10 years, by ignoring the conventions of the academy. He replaced the traditional politics curriculum, steeped in history, philosophy and law, with data-based behavioural political science; he bypassed protocol to recruit young and unorthodox talent, including mathematicians; and he insisted that every lecturer, however junior, published research, rapidly promoting those who did and sacking those who did not.

In 1970, having secured the pre-eminence of his department at Essex, he turned his attention to the poor state of political studies in Europe, as the effective founder and first director of the European Consortium for Political Research, which he led for 10 years. The uninspiring name disguised a unique institution that created a distinctive European political science. The idea was to offer academics Europe-wide, particularly the younger ones, the opportunity to engage in rigorous, collaborative cross-national research, through methodological training, research workshops and journals. It began with 25 member universities and institutes, and has more than 300 today. Few political scientists in Europe have been untouched by it, not least in the widening of their horizons and networks; Kipling’s “what should they know of England who only England know” might have been penned by Blondel. No other academic discipline has a comparable infrastructure.

The consortium was a prodigious feat of institution building, the product of Blondel’s skills as fundraiser, diplomat, organiser and tactician. His volcanic personality was critical. Gregarious and sparkling, he turned on – and off – his carefully curated Gallic charm to get his way. Tirelessly creative, energetic and resourceful, he had an exceptional ability to turn vision into reality.

In 1983, Blondel took early retirement from Essex, and a year later joined the European University Institute in Florence, where he concentrated on his comparative research, notably on cabinets and ministers. He retired again in 1985 to take up a chair at the University of Siena, where he continued to write into his late 80s, publishing studies of presidential institutions in Africa and Latin America.

He received numerous honours and awards, most notably the Swedish Johan Skytte prize, the closest that political science has to a Nobel prize.

Blondel’s first marriage, to Michele Hadet, ended in divorce in 1979. He is survived by his second wife, Tessa Martineau, whom he married in 1982, and his daughters from his first marriage, Nathalie and Dominique.