Professor Tim Haughton

• PG Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (Birmingham)
• PhD in Social Sciences/Slavonic and East European Studies (UCL)
• Diploma in Czech (Westminster)
• MA in Slavonic and East European Studies (London)
• BSc (Econ) in Government (LSE)

Tim Haughton joined the University of Birmingham in 2003 having previously taught at University College London's School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), Sheffield University and Comenius University in Bratislava. Initially appointed as Lecturer in the Politics of Central and Eastern Europe, he was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2006, Reader in European Politics in 2012, and Professor of Comparative and European Politics in 2022. He has taken on a number of significant administrative roles in the University including Head of POLSIS (2016-18), Director of CREES (2012-14), Director of Postgraduate Taught Programmes in POLSIS (2018-21) and POLSIS Director of Research (2022- ). Professor Haughton is a founding deputy director of the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR).

He has held Visiting Fellowships at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the Institute of International Relations in Prague, Colorado College and was an Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Fellow at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC.

Professor Haughton has published widely in a number of journals including Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Comparative European Politics, East European Politics, East European Politics and Societies, Electoral Studies, Europe-Asia Studies, Government and Opposition, Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, Party Politics, Perspective on Politics, Political Studies Review, Politics and Policy and West European Politics. He has also written several articles for the Washington Post. He is the co-author with Kevin Deegan-Krause of The New Party Challenge: Changing Cycles of Party Birth and Death in Central Europe and Beyond (2020), the author of Constraints and Opportunities of Leadership in Post-Communist Europe (2005), the editor of Party Politics in Central and Eastern Europe: Does EU Membership Matter? (2011) and was the co-editor with Nathaniel Copsey of the JCMS Annual Review of the European Union for nine years (2008-2016). His research has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Nuffield Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, the Centre for East European Language Based Area Studies (CEELBAS) and the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation.

Professor Haughton has good links with the policymaking community, having briefed inter alia five British Ambassadors to Slovakia, and given several presentations on Central European politics at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London and at the State Department in Washington DC.

Professor Haughton’s primary teaching responsibilities are:

• Varieties of Politics: The Comparative Politics of Parties, Institutions and Regimes (MA module) 
• Parties and Voters Around the Globe (final year undergraduate module)
• Comparative Politics (second year undergraduate module)
• (contribution to) Approaches to Research in Government (PhD module)

He has also taught numerous modules/courses for undergraduates and postgraduates including introduction to the EU, comparative politics, democratization, the political history and contemporary politics of Central and Eastern Europe and specialized courses on the European Union for civil servants on programmes funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Professor Haughton has supervised 14 doctoral researchers through to the completion of their PhDs: Dr Bernd Rechel's PhD thesis, 'Minority Rights in Post-Communist Bulgaria'; Dr Brigid Fowler's thesis examining EU accession and party politics in Hungary; Dr William Westwater's thesis on regional legislatures in Russia; Dr Magdalena Skrybant's thesis exploring the relationship between the intellectuals and workers in the Solidarity movement in Poland; Dr Lara Scarpitta's thesis examining Romanian accession to the EU; Dr Richard Connolly's thesis exploring the relationship between economic structures and political change in post-communist Europe; Dr Odeta Barbullushi's thesis examining Albania's Euro-Atlantic orientation; Dr Mike Adkins's thesis exploring party based Euroscepticism; Dr Laurence Cooley's PhD thesis examining the European Union and ethnic conflict resolution and management in the Western Balkans; Dr Stephanie Garstin’s thesis assessing infrastructure, legacy and scientific knowledge in the process of nuclear development in Poland; Dr Charlotte Galpin’s thesis examining the euro crisis and discourses of Europe in Germany, Ireland and Poland; Dr Veysel Erdemli’s thesis exploring Georgian Associations in Turkey; Dr Ziad Attiya Abu Mustafa’s thesis examining the causes of Palestinian disunity, 1993-2014; and Dr Yuxiang Lin’s thesis explaining the endurance of some new parties in Bulgaria.  

Professor Haughton is currently supervising PhD students examining Germany’s relations with East-Central Europe, party politics and democratization in Georgia and Moldova, and voting behaviour of ethnic minorities in the United Kingdom. He is particularly keen to supervise students wishing to study the domestic politics of East-Central Europe, party politics and political campaigning.

Research Interests

There are currently three main strands to Dr Haughton's research:

• Party politics, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe
• Political campaigning
• Domestic Czech, Bulgarian, Slovenian and especially Slovak politics

Current and Recent Projects 

• • The New Party Challenge (with Kevin Deegan-Krause).
  • Slovakia’s Sinuous Path from the 1989 Gentle Revolution to the Present
  • Splitting the Difference/the Volatility of Volatility: Towards a More Sophisticated Measures of Volatility (with Fernando Casal-Bertoa and Kevin Deegan-Krause)
  • Parties and Party Systems Across the Globe (with Kevin Deegan-Krause)
  • Political Campaigning in Central and Eastern Europe in Comparative Perspective (with David Cutts)
  • Corruption in Electoral Politics in East-Central Europe (with Natascha Neudorfer)
  • Democratic Resilience (with Licia Cianetti and colleagues from Leiden University)

With Nathaniel Copsey he was the joint editor of the Journal of Common Market Studies Annual Review of the European Union for nine years (2008-17) which is published by Wiley. In addition to a host of articles by leading scholars in the field, the nine Annual Reviews they edited included commissioned articles by Jose Manuel Barroso, Jean-Claude Trichet, Jerzy Buzek, Douglas Hurd, Iveta Radicova and Sergey Lavrov.

Alongside Dr Fernando Casal Bertoa from 2020-4 he served as the co-director of REPRESENT: a network of scholars from the Universities of Birmingham and Nottingham whose work focuses on parties, elections and representation and seeks to act as ‘hub’ for knowledge exchange between academic researchers, policy-makers and practitioners.