Levan Kakhishvili

Levan Kakhishvili is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the European Politics Research Group, as part of the EU Horizon collaborative project “Invigorating Enlargement and Neighbourhood Policy for a Resilient Europe” (InvigoratEU). He finished his doctoral studies in political science at Otto-Friedrich University of Bamberg, Germany in July 2024. Before joining ETH Zurich, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for East European Studies (CEES) at the University of Zurich, and a Country Anchor for Georgia in the framework of the second wave of the expert survey Democratic Accountability and Citizen-Politician Linkage Project II (DALP II) led by Professor Herbet Kitschelt at the Duke University. Levan holds degrees from the University of Oxford and Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University.

Levan’s dissertation monograph studies party competition in hybrid regimes by focusing on the case study of Georgia. Particularly, it builds a theory explaining how programmatic party competition emerges in hybrid regimes and how it intersects clientelist forms of competition. Apart from party politics, Levan’s research interests relate to European politics and foreign policy analysis with a special focus on former communist countries. His research has been published in East European Politics, Post-Soviet Affairs, and Europe-Asia Studies. 

Moreover, Levan has extensive experience in policy research and teaching. He has contributed to creating an Election Compass Georgia 2020 – a voting advice application used over 33,000 times. He has taught various courses on party competition, Russian politics, and post-communist transformation among others at the University of Bamberg and various universities in Georgia.

InvigoratEU

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