Donatella Della Porta is professor of sociology in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute. She has directed the Demos project, devoted to the analysis of conceptions and practices of democracy in social movements in six European countries. She is now starting a major ERC project Mobilizing for Democracy, on civil society participation in democratization processes in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. Her main fields of research are social movements, the policing of public order, participatory democracy and political corruption. Among her very recent publications are: Mobilizing on the Extreme Right (with M. Caiani and C. Wagemann), Oxford University Press, 2012;  Meeting Democracy (ed. With D. Rucht), Cambridge University Press, 2012; Democrazie, Il Mulino, 2011; The Hidden Order of Corruption (With A. Vannucci), Ashgate 2012; L’intervista qualitativa, Laterza 2011; (with M. Caiani), Social Movements and Europeanization, Oxford University Press, 2009; (ed.) Another Europe, Routledge, 2009; (ed.) Democracy in Social Movements, Palgrave, 2009; Approaches and Methodologies in the Social Sciences (with M. Keating), Cambridge University Press; (with Gianni Piazza), Voices from the Valley; Voices from the Streat Berghan, 2008; The Global Justice Movement, Paradigm, 2007; (with M. Andretta, L. Mosca and H. Reiter), Globalization from Below, The University of Minnesota Press; (with A. Peterson and H. Reiter), The policing transnational protest, Ashgate 2006; (with  M. Diani), Social Movements: an introduction, 2nd edition, Blackwell, 2006; (with S. Tarrow), Transnational Protest and Global Activism, Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.


Jonathan Jackson is a Senior Lecturer in the Methodology Institute and member of the Mannheim Centre for Criminology at the London School of Economics. Jon has held visiting appointments at New York University and the Universities of Oxford, Sydney and Cambridge. Jon’s research interests centre on notions of trust, legitimacy and normative commitment to cooperation and compliance. He is the principal investigator of a European Social Survey (Round 5) module on trust in justice and the legitimacy of legal authorities. He is also developing statistical tools of latent variable modeling for the analysis of cross-national survey data, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).


Stefan Svallfors is professor in Sociology (2000-) and Baltic Scholar
(2010-2016) at Umeå University. His research field is the comparative study of attitudes and values and their links to social structure and institutions. He is involved in several major attitude research programs: the International Social Survey Program, the European Social Survey, and the Swedish Welfare State Surveys. His current research mainly concerns attitudes to welfare policies and redistribution in Western countries. In 2011 he was Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute, Firenze. His latest book is "Contested Welfare States" (forthcoming at Stanford University Press).



Alex Callinicos is a Professor of European Studies at King's College London and editor of International Socialism. For many years he taught political philosophy at the University of York. His most recent books are The Resources of Critique, Imperialism and Global Political Economy, and Bonfire of Illusions. He is currently working on a book about Marx's Capital.