Nils Klim Prize 2012: Sara Hobolt

Nils Klim Prize laureate 2012 Sara Hobolt with Minister of Research and Education Kristin Halvorsen Photo: Holbergprisen / Marit Hommedal / Holbergprisen. Download large version.

Nils Klim Prize 2012 is awarded to Sara Hobolt.

Citation from the Nils Klim Prize Academic Committee:

«Sara Hobolt (b. 1977) received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Cambridge in 2005. She has held positions in some of the leading universities in the world, including the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Oxford, where she has been University Lecturer in Comparative Politics as well as a Fellow of Nuffield College and Lincoln College. She is now holding the Sutherland Chair in European Institutions at the London School of Economics and Political Science but also an Honorary Professorship at the University of Southern Denmark.

Her work has been presented in the book Europe in Question: Referendums on European Integration (Oxford University Press 2009) but also in a large number of articles in leading scholarly journals, including British Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Politics, Electoral Studies, and the Journal of European Public Policy and in a number of edited volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of the European Union.

Sara Hobolt’s research covers a wide range of key issues in studies of comparative politics: European integration, elections and referendums, but also the interaction between media, processes of opinion formation and responsiveness and responsibility of political elites and party systems. She combines the use of methods at the cutting edge of quantitative empirical methodology with an interest in such crucial questions as the nature and direction of development of national political systems as well as of the entire process of European integration. She systematically links empirical analysis to critical concerns in theory building about contemporary political systems at large. She brings out a wealth of data about opinion formation, governance and the conditions for democratic policy making, drawn from the European scene. Thereby she has enabled a more well-informed discussion about representation, elections and democracy than has previously been the case. Sara Hobolt’s scholarly achievements have helped to deepen and enrich, not only in empirical but also in conceptual terms, our understanding of the basic conditions of modern democracies.»