Dr Nic Cheeseman
Academic Background
Dr Cheeseman read for the BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at St Peter's College, University of Oxford, and was awarded a first class honours degree in 2001. He went on to read for the MPhil and then the DPhil in Politics at Nuffield College, Oxford, which he was awarded in 2006.
Dr Cheeseman has held lectureships in Politics at St Peter's and St Anne's Colleges. He held the Sir Christopher Cox Junior Research Fellowship at New College, University of Oxford, from October 2006 to August 2007 and was the Junior Dean at St Peter's College between October 2004 and September 2006. In 2008 he was awarded the Arthur McDougall Prize for the best dissertation on elections or representation by the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom.
Undergraduate Teaching
The Theory and Practice of Democracy; Comparative Government; Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Postgraduate Teaching
African Studies MSc; Comparative Government MPhil; Democratization and Multi-Party Politics in Africa.
Research Interests
Dr Cheeseman works in the field of comparative politics with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa and processes of democratization. In 2008 he was awarded the Arthur McDougall Prize for the best dissertation on elections or representation by the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom.
His doctoral research focussed on the question of how African leaders and ruling parties have manipulated institutions and patronage structures in order to construct and protect power, which strategies have proved the most effective, and what impact this has had on processes of democratization. Looking particularly at the experience of Africa’s one-party states, he has sought to explain why and how different patronage structures mobilize support, why some political parties prove to be more durable than others, and why some regimes survived the transition to multi-partyism while others did not.
More recently, Dr Cheeseman has published on a wide range of topics including the impact of opinion polls in Africa's new democracies, whether African political parties are 'ethnic', the roots of the 'Kenya crisis' of 2008, the potential for opposition leaders to successfully use populist strategies in Africa, and the impact of power-sharing arrangements in Kenya and Zimbabwe.
Earlier this year a research team of Dr Paul Chaisty, Dr Nic Cheeseman and Dr Timothy Power were awarded over £700,000 by the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant Reference: RES-062-23-2892) for a new project to study the dynamics of executive-legislative relations in Africa, Latin America and the former Soviet Union. For more information see the Department of Politics and International Relations news pages.
He also runs Democracy in Africa, a website dedicated to promoting the study of democracy in Africa which features a regular blog and a wide variety of resources.
Links
Subject notes for courses taught at Jesus College:
Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE)
See also the African Studies Centre website, and Dr Cheeseman's personal website, Democracy in Africa.
