Jan-Erik Lane

Jan-Erik Lane (born 1946 in Göteborg) is a Swedish political scientist.

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. In 1996 he received the Humboldt Award by the Humboldt Stiftung. At the University of Geneva (1996-2008), he taught around 700 students a year at all levels, from 1st year to PhD. He has been visiting professor at several universities in the US, Africa and Asia, receiving a Lady Davis professorship at the Hebrew University in 2006. He now teaches regionalism and development at the University of South Pacific in Fiji.

Theoretical work

He has made 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 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 Umeå 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.

His analysis of globalisation focuses upon resources, especially fossil fuels, and the environment, looking upon Swedish Arrhenius, Danish Warming and American Hubbert as the first theoreticians of the global dilemma that is now unfolding, which he names "the energy-environment conundrum".

In his recent book on comparative politics, he argues that the rule of law regime is the evolutionary solution to the ever present principal-agent problem in governance and politics. In order to bridge the hiatus between the disciplines of public administration and public management, Lane argues that policy-making and policy implementation should be analysed as "state management" problems.

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