Philippe C. Schmitter

In 2009, Schmitter won the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science for his "path-breaking work on the role of corporatism in modern democracies, and for his stimulating and innovative analysis of democratization". He also received the ECPR Lifetime Achievement Award by the European Consortium for Political Research in 2007, the EUSA Award for Lifetime Achievement in European Studies by the European Union Studies Association in 2009, and the Mattei Dogan Prize awarded by the International Political Science Association (IPSA) to a scholar of high international reputation in recognition of their contribution to political science in 2009.

Schmitter's main work on democratization is Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions About Uncertain Democracies (1986), with Guillermo O'Donnell. This book was one of the most widely read and influential works in comparative politics during the 1980s and 1990s. O’Donnell and Schmitter proposed a strategic choice approach to transitions to democracy that highlighted how they were driven by the decisions of different actors in response to a core set of dilemmas. The analysis centered on the interaction among four actors: the hard-liners and soft-liners who belonged to the incumbent authoritarian regime, and the moderate and radical oppositions against the regime. This book not only became the point of reference for a burgeoning academic literature on democratic transitions, it was also read widely by political activists engaged in actual struggles to achieve democracy.

In "Still the Century of Corporatism?" (1974), Schmitter reintroduced the concept of corporatism to political science and distinguished between two types of corporatism: societal or liberal, corporatism, and the state or authoritarian corporatism. This work challenged pluralist theory. As described by Ming-sho Ho, societal, or liberal, corporatism, "is a form of economic tripartitism rooted in a “social partnership” between capital and labor so that public intervention in the market economy can be facilitated for stability and growth." In contrast, the state or authoritarian corporatism "emanates from the attempts for control by nondemocratic rulers and results in the creation of dominated and dependent interest associations."

Since 1967 he has been successively assistant professor, associate professor and professor in the Politics Department of the University of Chicago (1967–82), then at the European University Institute (1982–86 and 1997–2005) and at Stanford (1986–96). In 1996 he returned to the European University Institute, where he retired in 2004.

Schmitter has a B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1957, a licence from the [[Graduate Institute of International Studies]] in Geneva and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1967.

When he was working on his dissertation on “Development and Interest Politics in Brazil from 1930–1965", he went to Rio de Janeiro in 1965 to teach at the Instituto de Ciências Socias da Universidade do Brasil, as part of initiative closely tied to the Alliance for Progress.