Professor Asher Arian

Prof. Asher Arian was born in Cleveland, Ohio (U.S.) in 1938. He received his B.A. (cum laude) from Western Reserve University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Michigan State University.

Prof. Arian moved to Israel in 1966, where he set up the Political Science Department at Tel Aviv University and was appointed its first head. He designed the Department's syllabus, put together a team of lecturers and researchers, and turned it into one of the leading departments of its type in the country. Arian stayed on as department head until 1973, resuming the post a decade later for two years (1983-1984). Upon his departure, he was appointed head of the Golda Meir Institute of Labor and Social Research at Tel Aviv University. In 1977, he became Dean of Tel Aviv University's Faculty of Social Sciences, after which he held the Romulo Betancourt Chair in Political Science at Tel Aviv University.

In 1979, Arian was a member of the group that wrote the founding charter of the Israel Association of Political Science; that same year, he was elected as chair of the organization. During his tenure, he founded the Association's annual conference and invested in broadening the membership base and developing the organization's activities.

Prof. Arian has represented Israel on the international research scene. During the 1980s, he was appointed a member of the Executive Committee of the International Political Science Association, and was elected vice-chair of the organization's annual conferences of 1985 to 1988. From 1994 to 2002, he served as editor of the Association's prestigious series Advances in Political Science, then published by Macmillan.

Since 1986, Arian has been a Distinguished Professor in political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he also headed the doctoral studies program and the Robert F. Wagner Sr. Center for Urban Public Policy. In the early 1990s, Arian moved to the University of Haifa, where he served as a Full Professor until his retirement in 2006.

During the course of his research in political science, Arian has published dozens of books and articles dealing with governance, elections, and public opinion and political behavior in Israel from a global, comparative perspective. Three of the major projects under his leadership are a series of surveys and books on Israeli elections (the most enduring multi-year research project in political science in Israel, initiated by Arian in 1969), the national defense policy and public opinion project of Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, and the Democracy Index of the Israel Democracy Institute's Guttman Center.

In the mid-1990s, Arian was appointed a Senior Fellow of the Israel Democracy Institute, which has been the focus of most of his work in recent years. In this post, he spearheaded the inclusion of the Guttman Institute for Applied Social Research under the auspices of the Israel Democracy Institute. In 2006, the (renamed) Guttman Center was awarded the Tolerance Prize by the Public Committee of Tolerance, a nonpartisan organization to curtail violence. In 2005, he was awarded with the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award by The Israel Political Science Association.

Asher Arian is a married father of three and grandfather of seven. His oldest son, Lior, is a criminologist with the Israel Prison Service. His son Aviv and daughter Shelly are clinical psychologists.

Asher Arian, Israel Democracy Index 2008: Between the State and Civil Society, with T. Hermann, N. Atmor, Y. Hadar, Y. Lebel, and H. Zaban. Jerusalem: The Israel Democracy Institute, 2008 (Hebrew version, 2008). 

Asher Arian, The Elections in Israel -- 2006, edited with Michal Shamir, Transaction Press and The Israel Democracy Institute, 2008 (Hebrew 2008).