Marc F. Plattner is vice-president for research and studies at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), codirector of the International Forum for Democratic Studies, and coeditor of the Journal of Democracy, a quarterly publication that addresses the problems and prospects of democracy around the world. He served as NED's director of program from 1984 to 1989. During the 2002-2003 academic year he was a visiting professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He has previously been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina (1983-84); Advisor on Economic and Social Affairs at the United States Mission to the United Nations (1981-83); program officer at the Century Foundation (formerly the Twentieth Century Fund), a private foundation in New York City (1975-81); and managing editor of The Public Interest, a quarterly journal on public policy (1971-75). Dr. Plattner graduated summa cum laude from Yale University and received his Ph.D. in government from Cornell University, where his principal area of study was political philosophy. Over the past decade, he has coedited more than a dozen books and written extensively on contemporary issues relating to democracy.
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a private, nonprofit organization created in 1983 to strengthen democratic institutions around the world through nongovernmental efforts. The Endowment is governed by an independent, nonpartisan board of directors. With its annual congressional appropriation, it makes hundreds of grants each year to support prodemocracy groups in Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union. The Endowment is guided by the belief that freedom is a universal human aspiration that can be realized through the development of democratic institutions, procedures, and values.
