Guest Lecture - Political elites and societal development: Notes on Slovenia and Macedonia

Jochen Töpfer will hold a guest lecture on January 26, 2012 (Room 0114 Building 39, 6.00 pm) about "Political elites and societal development: Notes on Slovenia and Macedonia".

Small societies, as Macedonia and Slovenia, had particular circumstances and showed patterns of change that differ from commonly accepted transition theory. The lecture will present the transformation of these two societies in South-Eastern Europe from an elite perspective. Which influence had the political elite as an independent variable on development and transformation? What about historical path-dependencies and external constrains, often used to explain differences of societal development?
Political elites in transition are commonly characterized by structural categories as their formal education or fluctuation in political offices. Here, recruitment and behaviour of this decisive group are taken into focus – an action-oriented approach.

Jochen Toepfer, Dr. rer. pol., was visiting researcher at the University of Ljubljana / Slovenia and the University `Sv. Kiril i Metodij` in Skopje/Macedonia. Currently he is researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Eastern-European Studies at the Free University of Berlin.