Bio

Jeffrey Praed Broadbent (born 1944) is a Professor (emeritus) in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota whose academic focus includes comparative sociology; environmental sociology; political networks; political sociology; social movements; comparative policy networks; method of Integrative Structurational Analysis; multidimensional theoretical explanation; unified field theory.  

Broadbent received the B.A. (1974) in religious studies-Buddhism at the University of California, Berkeley, the M.A. (1975) in Regional Studies—Japan at Harvard University, and the Ph.D. (1982) in sociology at Harvard University.   From 1983-86, he was a Junior Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows, University of Michigan, with concurrent appointments as assistant professor, Dept. of Sociology and senior researcher, Center for Japanese Studies. In 1986, he became assistant professor, Dept. of Sociology, University of Minnesota, retiring there as full professor in 2021.   He was also a member of the Institute for Global Studies, and continues as a Fellow of the Institute on the Environment, both at the University of Minnesota.  

Broadbent received the National Science Foundation graduate fellowship, and the Fulbright graduate fellowship for conducting his dissertation fieldwork in Japan (1978-81).  For his later data collection on labor policy networks in Japan (1988-90), Broadbent received the Japan-United States Educational Commission fellowship (a Fulbright Program) from 1988 to 1989, and was a Fulbright-Hays scholar from 1989-1990. To conduct comparative research on climate policy networks (Japan, Germany, U.S.), he received the SSRC/Abe Fellowship for 2005-6. Broadbent was awarded two academic prizes for his book, Environmental Politics in Japan: Networks of Power and Protest (Cambridge University Press, 1998), the best book award from the Section on Environmental Sociology of the American Sociological Association (2000) and the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize in Japan (2001).

In 2007 Broadbent initiated the COMPON Project (Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks), an ongoing international research project comparing the politics and governance processes of making climate change mitigation policies in 20 countries around the world. The COMPON project members have produced over 150 research papers.  This project has received grants from the US National Science Foundation and other countries’ science foundations.

Building on his research experience in political sociology, he has recently published a method for empirically assessing the relative explanatory validity of a wide range of theories and their posited causal factors, as applied to a specific case of political process, and integrating them into a multidimensional explanation​ of the case. ​The method obtains the needed evidence by analyzing the power relations in many interactive and causally effective two actor pairs (dyads) at the micro level of the case. This method overcomes reductionistic explanatory tendencies in our fields. Instead, it offers a universally applicable method for ​explaining complex political processes. ​In sum, the method ​brings us closer to a case-specific​ unified field theory.​ The paper illustrates the method through a​n empirical analysis of a case study of env​ironmental politics in Japan​.  The paper, available open access online in the Journal of Political Power, is titled “Power and Theory: Toward a Multidimensional Explanation of the Dynamic Political Field.” The link is:

https://www.tandfonline.com/<wbr>doi/full/10.1080/2158379X.<wbr>2024.2408017