Department of Government

Marc Morjé Howard is an Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University. Professor Howard's research and teaching interests address a variety of topics related to democracy and democratization, including civil society, immigration and citizenship, hybrid regimes, right-wing extremism, and public opinion. He is a native speaker of English and French, fluent in German and Russian, and he has conducted primary research in all four languages.

Howard's most recent book, The Politics of Citizenship in Europe, was published in 2009 by Cambridge University Press. It received the 2010 ENMISA Distinguished Book Award, presented by the International Studies Association's organized section on Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration. Howard has published four journal articles related to his research on comparative citizenship.

Howard is also the author of The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe, which was published in 2003 by Cambridge University Press. This book has received three awards: the 2004 Award for Best Book on European Politics, presented by the American Political Science Association's organized section on European Politics and Society; the 2004 Virginia Hodgkinson Research Prize, presented by Independent Sector; and the 2006 Alpha Sigma Nu National Jesuit Book Award, presented by the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. The book was recently translated into Serbian and Russian.

Howard is the co-editor (with Vladimir Tismaneanu and Rudra Sil) of World Order After Leninism, which was published by the University of Washington Press in 2006.

He is also collaborating with Philip G. Roessler of the University of Oxford on an ongoing research project on elections and change in post-cold war political regimes. Their first article, published in the American Journal of Political Science, studied the causes of liberalizing electoral outcomes in competitive authoritarian regimes. Their second piece, published as a chapter in Democratization by Elections: A New Mode of Transition, analyzes temporal and spatial changes across all regime types between 1987 and 2006. Currently, they are analyzing the causes of electoral contestation in authoritarian regimes.

In addition, Howard directed the "Citizenship, Involvement, Democracy" (CID) project, a major representative survey of Americans carried out in the spring/summer of 2005, which has resulted in several publications about American civic engagement in comparative perspective, most notably a special issue of Political Studies in March 2008.

Howard has published articles in a variety of refereed journals (click on the journal title to download the actual article in PDF), including: the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, Political Studies, the International Migration Review, the Journal of Civil Society, the Journal of Democracy, Demokratizatsiya, East European Politics and Societies, German Politics and Society, and German Politics. He has also published an instructional piece as part of a symposium on the methods of field research. And he has received grants from such organizations as the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Science Foundation, in support of his research.

In addition to his academic work, Howard has served as an Assistant Coach of the Georgetown tennis team. And he has published three articles in Tennis Magazine: “No Pain, No Gain: When Ivan Lendl called for a hitting partner, wild horses—or dogs—couldn’t keep this player away,” “The Tennis Chain-Saw Miracle,” and “Child's Play.”

Moreover, Howard has taken a personal interest in the issue of wrongful convictions in the American judicial system, and in particular the case of his childhood friend, Marty Tankleff, who was wrongfully imprisoned for over 17 years until his conviction was overturned in December 2007. He has published op-eds about Tankleff's case in the New York Times and Newsday. He also appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show for an episode on Marty Tankleff and false confessions (click here to read a summary of the interview, and here to see the 3-minute clip).