António Costa Pinto is a Research Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, and Professor of Politics and Contemporary European History at ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon. He holds a Ph.D. from the European University Institute, Florence (1992). He has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, Georgetown University, a senior associate member at St Antony's College, Oxford, and a senior visiting fellow at Princeton University and at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1999 to 2011 he has been a regular visiting professor at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris. He was president of the Portuguese Political Science Association (2006-2010) and his research interests include authoritarianism, political elites, democratization and transitional justice in new democracies, the European Union, and the comparative study of political change in Southern Europe. He is a regular contributor to the mainstream Portuguese media.