Stein Rokkan (July 4, 1921 – July 22, 1979) was a Norwegian political scientist and sociologist. He was the first professor of sociology at the University of Bergen and a principal founder of the discipline of comparative politics. He founded the multidisciplinary Department of Sociology at the University of Bergen, which encompassed sociology, economics and political science and which had a key role in the postwar development of the social sciences in Norway. Career Stein Rokkan was born on the Lofoten archipelago in the far north of Norway and raised in the nearby town of Narvik. Rokkan completed his gymnasium years in 1939, and he received a magister artium in political philosophy from the University of Oslo in 1948. Rokkan's studies were interrupted in 1943 when the German occupation closed the University of Oslo and he returned to the university after the liberation in 1945. Rokkan then turned to empirical research, and studied at Columbia University, Chicago and the London School of Economics between 1949 and 1951. In the United States, Rokkan was a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at Columbia and Chicago from 1948 to 1950. At Columbia University, his work with Paul Lazarsfeld acquainted him with modern social research methods. At the London School of Economics, he met T. H. Marshall. He subsequently worked at the Norwegian Institute for Social Research (ISF) from 1951 until 1957, and moved to Bergen in 1958, where he worked at the Chr. Michelsen Institute from 1958 to 1966. In 1966 he became Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bergen. Over the years Rokkan was three times a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a visiting professor at various universities (Manchester, Stanford, Geneva, the London School of Economics, the Instituts d'études politiques in Paris. He also held a permanent appointment as Visiting Professor at Yale University. Rokkan co-founded, with Shmuel Eisenstadt, Morris Janowitz, and Seymour Martin Lipset, the Committee on Political Sociology (CPS) of the International Sociological Association (ISA) in 1960 and served as its secretary from 1960 to 1970. He was vice-president of the International Sociological Association from 1966 to 1970; president of the International Political Science Association from 1970 to 1973; chairman (from 1970 to 1976) and co-founder of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR); and president of the International Social Science Council (ISSC), which was founded by UNESCO, from 1973 to 1977. Awards