Jan-Erik Lane
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Jan-Erik Lane (born 1946 in Göteborg) is a Swedish political scientist.
[edit] Life
Jan-Erik Lane has taught politics and economics at many universities around the world. He is member of many editorial boards of political science journals. He has published some 250 books and articles. At the University of Geneva (1996-2008), he taught around 700 students a year at all levels, from 1st year to PhD. He has done contributions to N-person game theory (power indices), voter volatility, comparative democracy theory and the principal-agent approach to public administration. Recently, he has published with Florent Dieterlen (University of Lausanne) a global Hubbert curve for oil production. He has been visiting professor at several universities in the US and Asia, receiving a Lady Davis professorship at the Hebrew University in 2006. He looks upon politics as a succession of principal-agent games, starting with the electoral contract, i.e. of voting in a new national assembly and government in order to end up in the setting up of implementation agencies working under a contract with government. Thus, politics is basically contracting, which raises the issues of consideration and quid pro quo, which issues tend to be resolved differently in democracies on the one hand and authoritarian regimes on the other hand. Yet, all politics involves contractual opacity and the serious risk of a mismatch between promises and outcomes, due to the long intertemporal nature of the electoral or administrative contracts. His most recent work includes an evolutionary theory of political regimes as well as an article upon the economic convergence in the EU land. Looking at European politics, he suggests that voter volatility is the key concept for understanding party system change. Thus, he has measured gross and net volatility with Svante Ersson at Umea university. With Reinert Maeland he has published several articles showing the usefulness of the power index method from n-person game theory for understanding coalition making in international organisations and parliaments. In 1996 he received the Humboldt Award by the Humboldt Stiftung. His analysis of globalisation focuses upon resources, especially fossil fuels, and the environment, looking upon Swedish Arrhenius, Danish Warming amd American Hubbert as the first theoreticians of the global dilemma that is now unfolding. In his new book on comparative politics, he argues that the rule of lae regime is the evolutionary solution to the ever present principal-agent problem in governance and politics. He now teaches regionalism and development at the University of South Pacific in Fiji.
