Jeffrey Broadbent

University of Minnesota

Based in

United States
North America

Jeffrey Praed Broadbent (b. 1944) is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, with research expertise in comparative sociology, environmental sociology, climate change, political networks, political sociology, social movements, comparative policy networks, and multidimensional theoretical explanation. He has developed the method of Integrative Structurational Analysis for the empirical construction of multidimensional theoretical explanations of cases of complex political processes.

Broadbent earned his B.A. in Religious Studies (with a focus on Buddhism) from the University of California, Berkeley (1974), an M.A. in Regional Studies—Japan from Harvard University (1975), and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard (1982). From 1983 to1986, he was a Junior Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan, where he held concurrent appointments as an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and a senior researcher at the Center for Japanese Studies. In 1986, he joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, where he was promoted to full professor and remained until his retirement in 2021. He was also affiliated with the Institute for Global Studies and continues as a Fellow of the Institute
on the Environment at the University of Minnesota.

Broadbent’s research has been recognized with prestigious awards, including a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship, which funded his dissertation fieldwork in Japan (1978–1981). Later, his research on labor policy networks in Japan (1988–1990) was supported by a Japan-United States Educational Commission Fellowship (Fulbright Program) and a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship. His comparative study of climate policy networks in Japan, Germany, and the U.S. was funded by the SSRC/Abe Fellowship (2005–2006). His book, Environmental Politics in Japan: Networks of Power and Protest (Cambridge University Press, 1998), earned the Best Book Award from the Environmental Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association (2000) and the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize in Japan (2001).

In 2007, Broadbent founded the COMPON Project (Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks), a major international research initiative examining the governance and political processes surrounding climate change mitigation policies across 20 countries. To date, COMPON researchers have produced over 150 academic papers, supported bygrants from the U.S. National Science Foundation and other international funding bodies. Project website: http://www.compon.org/

Recently, Broadbent has developed and published a new method for empirically
evaluating the relative explanatory power of various causal theories in the study of political processes. This method synthesizes diverse theoretical perspectives into a weighted, multidimensional explanation by analyzing micro-level power dynamics among interacting dyads. The approach counters reductionist tendencies in the social sciences and aims to offer a universally applicable method for understanding complex political processes. His latest paper, “Power and Theory: Toward a Multidimensional Explanation of the Dynamic Political Field,” illustrates this method through an empirical case study of environmental politics in Japan. The article is available open access in the
Journal of Political Power:
https://www.tandfonline.com/<wbr>doi/full/10.1080/2158379X.<wbr>2024.2408017