Alfred Stepan

In 2012, he was awarded the Karl Deutsch Award by the International Political Science Association. The award is intended "to honour a prominent scholar engaged in the cross-disciplinary research of which Karl Deutsch was a master".

In 2007, he was included on a list of the 400 most highly cited US-based political scientists.

In 2002, Stepan was awarded the Order of Rio Branco by the Brazilian government. He has also been awarded the Kalman Silvert Award for his lifetime contribution to Latin American studies.

He authored and edited a number of books, including Arguing Comparative Politics (Oxford University Press, 2001), Crafting State-Nations. India and Other Multinational Democracies (co-authored with Juan Linz and Yogendra Yadav; 2011), Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post Communist Europe (with Juan Linz; 1996) and Democracies in Danger (2009).

in 1991, Stepan was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He subsequently taught at Yale University, before being appointed Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia in 1983. He became the first Rector of Central European University (CEU) in 1993, and in 1996 was appointed Gladstone Professor of Government at All Souls College, Oxford University. He returned to Columbia University in 1999. He has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1991 and a member of the British Academy since 1997.

The Military in Politics, Stepan analyzes the breakdown of democracy in Brazil in 1964. Stepan "challenged the prevailing view in comparative research that saw the military as a force for achieving modernization and national integration." He also showed that "understanding the military’s political behavior ... required a focus on the broader context of civil-military relations."

Alfred C. Stepan (July 22, 1936 – September 27, 2017) was an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He was the Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government at Columbia University, where he was also director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion. He is known for his comparative politics research on the military, state institutions, democratization, and democracy.

Stepan was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1936. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a B.A. in 1958. He gained his PhD from Columbia University in 1969 where his dissertation was supervised by Juan José Linz.