Tiago Fernandes (PhD European University Institute, Florence, 2009) is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE). He also directs the Varieties of Democracy Regional Center for Southern Europe and is a researcher at the Center for International Studies - ISCTE. He works on the politics of democracy, social movements and civil society, with a regional specialization on Southern Europe. Before coming to ISCTE, he was for twenty years in the faculty of Nova University of Lisbon, where he taught in the departments of sociology and political studies, was director of graduate studies and head of the department of political science and served in the directive board of the Portuguese Institute of International Relations (IPRI). 

Selected publications: Neither Dictatorship, Nor Revolution. The Liberal Wing and the End of the Portuguese Dictatorship, Lisbon, D. Quixote / Assembleia da República (2006); Civil Society, Democracy, and Inequality: Cross-Regional Comparisons (1970s-2010s), Special Issue, Comparative Politics (2017) (co-edited); Late neoliberalism and its discontents: Comparing crises and movements in the European periphery, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2017 (co-authored); Memories and Movements. The Legacy of Democratic Transitions in Contemporary Anti-Austerity Protest, Oxford University Press, 2018 (co-authored); Forty-Five Years of Democracy in Portugal: Achievements and Prospects, Lisbon, Assembleia da República, 2020 (co-edited); Democratic Quality in Southern Europe: France, Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Spain, University of Notre Dame Press, Kellogg Series on Democracy and Development, 2024 (edited); and Portugal 1974-1975: Revolution, Counterrevolution, and Democracy, Lisbon, Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation, 2024.

Together with Staffan Lindberg (Varieties of Democracy Institute - University of Gothenburg), he directs the project Varieties of Democracy in Southern Europe, which focuses on the causes and consequences of democratization in the region from the 1960s to the present and is funded by the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation (https://www.v-dem.net/en/regional-centers/southern-europe/). He also coordinated the Portuguese team of the project Disobedient Democracy, led by Danijela Dolenec at the University of Zagreb and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, which looked at the causes and patterns of protest in the Southwest and Southeast regions of Europe (https://disdem.org/).

He is also a non-resident fellow at the Center on Social Movement Studies (Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence). He was a visiting scholar at Princeton University, the Juan March Foundation (Madrid) and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame (USA) and is the recipient of the Gulbenkian Foundation award for the best article in the social sciences and the Best PhD Dissertation prize of the Portuguese Political Science Association.

His current research focuses on the comparative analysis of civil society mobilization against authoritarian takeovers in 19^th and early 20^th centuries Southern Europe; the impact of social revolution on democracy and authoritarianism; and postcolonial transformations in lusophone Africa (with Olukunle Owolabi, Villanova University).

Before starting his academic career, he took a BA in Sociology (minors in History and Philosophy) and an MPhil in Historical Sociology at Nova University of Lisbon and an MPhil in Social and Political Sciences at the European University Institute (Florence). He also passed the national examinations for the diplomatic service at the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he briefly attended the attaché training course (1997).