Gerard Alexander is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. His research began with a focus on the conditions of democratic consolidation in advanced industrial countries, especially in Western Europe. His first book — The Sources of Democratic Consolidation (Cornell University Press, 2002) — argued that the key right-of-center political movements formed long-term commitments to democracy only when their political risks in democracy became relatively low as left agendas moderated across time. Variation in these risks was used to explain variation in conservative regime preferences and in regime outcomes in Europe’s five largest countries from the 1870’s France to 1980’s Spain. His current research concerns factors affecting the size and role of government in selected cases in Western Europe and also the United States, and how they influence conservative attempts at reform of welfare states. [Taken from http://politics.virginia.edu/gerard-alexander/]