Jan-Erik Lane (born 1946 in Göteborg) is a Swedish political scientist.[1]
Jan-Erik Lane has taught politics and economics at many universities around the world. He has been member of many editorial boards of political science journals. He has published some 300 books and articles. In 1996 (and 2009) he received the Humboldt Award by the Humboldt Stiftung. He has been full professor at the Umea university in Sweden and Oslo university in Norway. At the University of Geneva (1996–2008), he taught and examined alone around 800 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 Fellowship (visiting professor) at the Hebrew University in 2006 and also 2012, as well as honorary medal from Kairo University and the University of Qatar. During the first semester of 2011 he lectured a course entitled 'Introductory Political Economy' at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.[2] After teaching regionalism and development at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, Lane was Mercator visiting professor at the University of Heidelberg in Germany and teaches now at the Unıversity of Freiburg in Breisgau as visiting professor. He is a permanent resident in the Republic of Geneva.
He has made contributions to the study of culture, N-person game theory (power indices), voter volatility, comparative democracy theory and the principal-agent approach to public administration. 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. He analyzed links and interactions between politics, lines of policies and national budgets together with the journalist Stefan Back. With Reinert Maeland (Stavanger) 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. Together with Hamedi Redissi at Tunis University he has offered a non-fundamentalist interpretation of Islam and the Moslem civilisation.
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 real global dilemma that is now unfolding, which he names "the energy-environment conundrum". His book on globalisation theorizes it as a Juggernaut process where the only remedy is a global open society.
In order to bridge the hiatus between the disciplines of public administration and public management, Lane argues in his most recent book that policy-making and policy implementation should be analysed as state management problems. He argues that the EU is only one form of regionalisation, as the other regions of the world may wish to organise themselves differently.
Constitutionalism or constitutional goes to the heat of the problems of politics when it looks upon political leadership from the principal-agent framework - this is the theme of his most recent book with MUP on Constitutions and Political Theory. In a new 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. Together with Uwe Wagschal, he explores new themes in cultural enquiry, especially value orientations in a new book with Routledge.
Recently, professor Lane has published several articles on global environmental policy coordination, arguing that inter alia the steady progression of CO2 equivalent emissions warrants the creating of a global evironmental board. The risks inherent in climate chage can only be reduced if all countries start limiting their TOTAL emissions.
His new book "Rational Choice and the New Institutionalism" examines inter alia the idea of a new logic of explanation in the social sciences: "logic of appropriateness". It is completely untenable, as it confuses institutions as constraining rules with human motivation as means-end intentions. Incentives drive humans within the restraints from rules or institutions. As Wittgenstein put it in Philosophical Investigations: The mere fact that there is a rule does not entail that it is followed.
In another new book, Lane looks at theories within Internationa Relations in order to enquire into how well they capture the new emerging world order with one global market economy, regionalism, environmentalism, the energy-environment conundrum and terrorist politics.