José María Maravall is Professor of Sociology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and a Honorary Fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He holds doctorates from the universities of Madrid and Oxford, as well as a D.Litt (Hons.) from the University of Warwick. He has been a Research Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Warwick, and has taught as Juan Carlos I Visiting Professor in the Department of Politics at New York University, Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Columbia, Jean Monnet Visiting Professor at the European University Institute (Florence), and Visiting Professor at the Minda de Gunzburg Center of European Studies at Harvard University. He was Spanish Minister of Education and Science between 1982 and 1988.
His major works include Dictatorship and Political Dissent, 1978; The Transition to Democracy in Spain, 1982; Economic Reforms in New Democracies (with L. C. Bresser and A. Przeworski), 1993; Regimes, Politics and Markets, 1997; Democracy and the Rule of Law (co-editor with A. Przeworski), 2003; El Control de los Políticos, 2003; Controlling Governments. Voters, Institutions, and Accountability (co-editor with I. Sánchez-Cuenca), 2008; La Confrontación Política, 2008. He won the Spanish National Award for Sociology and Political Science in 2007.