Brian D. Silver

A member of the MSU faculty since 1975, Professor Silver served as Chair of the Department of Political Science from 1987 to 1996. He founded (in 1994) and directs the “State of the State Survey,” a quarterly survey of public opinion in Michigan (www.ippsr.msu.edu/soss).

Before coming to MSU, Professor Silver served on the faculty of Florida State University. He earned his PhD in Political Science and a Certificate in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Wisconsin (Madison). He earned his B.A. at Reed College.

Professor Silver received a Distinguished Faculty Award from MSU in 1990. He was a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science in Stanford. He has served on numerous national boards and committees, including Chair of the Social Science Research Council’s Committee on Post-Soviet Politics and the Council of the Midwest Political Science Association. Since 1988 Professor Silver has been continuously funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Russell Sage Foundation, and other foundations and agencies.

Professor Silver’s main research field is comparative politics, with a focus on Central and East Europe and Eurasia. He has a strong interest as well in survey research and has designed and conducted surveys in Belarus, China, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, and the U.S. He has published widely in the major journals in Slavic area studies, political science, public opinion, and demography. A recurrent concern in his research has been ethnic and racial differences in political behavior and political attitudes, including using large-scale cross-national surveys to investigate minority group perceptions of political institutions and democracy. In collaboration with Professor Darren W. Davis, for the last several years Professor Silver has conducted a major study of American public opinion in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Professor Silver’s main teaching interests are in comparative politics, research design, and mass political behavior.