Jean Blondel, who has died aged 93, was one of the founding fathers of modern political science. He transformed the comparative study of democratic political institutions through his research and many publications, and by his energetic development of the discipline throughout Europe. In both his intellectual and organisational endeavours, Blondel was a creative revolutionary.
In 1963, he published Voters, Parties and Leaders, a pioneering study of how public opinion, elections and party organisations together formed the input side of the British political system. The first to make extensive use of emerging survey data and participant observation research, it inspired the upcoming generation of academics recruited to the rapidly expanding political science departments of the 1960s to follow suit.
