CIS - Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas

PRAISE OF D. PABLO OÑATE RUBALCABA

Your Majesty, Lord, thank you for your presence once again at such a pleasing event for those of us who are part of the social sciences community.

Minister of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Courts;

President of the CIS;

Academic authorities, juries, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen.

It is a pleasure and an honor for me to honor Professor Pablo Oñate Rubalcaba, whom I have known since his student days at the Autonomous University of Madrid and whose excellent professional career I have had the opportunity to follow from the very beginning. We both belonged to the same academic school, the one that centered around the great figure of Francisco Murillo Ferrol, who, incidentally, was the first Spanish social scientist to receive this prestigious award.

Pablo Oñate, the youngest of us all, grew intellectually in this environment, where different specialties and sensibilities of our discipline coexisted, and he had the opportunity to train in all of them. This gave him access to a broad basic education, which undoubtedly had the medium-term effect of providing him with outstanding merits without losing the analytical balance that should characterize a good academic. He has pursued this intense and extensive career, achieving "the necessary level of abstraction while keeping his feet firmly planted on the ground of a complex, shifting, and, above all, contentious reality (...), which has something of a dizzying tightrope walk." This was stated by Don Francisco Murillo in the Prologue to the publication of the doctoral thesis that Pablo Oñate defended in 1996, with the suggestive title "Consensus and Ideology in the Spanish Political Transition."

Since I cannot circumvent time constraints, in what follows I will attempt a brief dissection of these merits, which undoubtedly make him worthy of this award. I begin by emphasizing that, despite his theoretical training, he was always more interested in empirical areas and perspectives, all of them central to contemporary politics: the analysis of electoral behavior, the values of political culture, institutions, electoral systems and their effects, electoral campaigns, parliament and parliamentarians, parties and party systems, the multilevel articulation of the Spanish political system and electoral Spains, political representation and its articulation in parliaments, populism and political polarization, and emotions in political behavior, among other topics.

As you can see, his interests were not anchored in a single substantive area: he has traced a curricular trajectory characterized by the diversity of topics, all of them fundamental for our political systems, topics that have deserved his attention and to which he has tenaciously dedicated his publications, in the heat of his participation in numerous networks and research projects of different levels, national and international, as well as his active participation in the most reputable conferences of the Discipline, in Spain and abroad.

This intense research activity has resulted in numerous individual and co-authored publications. He has authored, edited, or co-edited 19 books, and over 100 journal articles and book chapters published in the most reputable journals and publishing houses. He has adapted to the increasing demands of publishing his work in publications ranked among the top quartiles of international rankings (JCR or SPI International, etc.), publishing the results of his work in the best international and national journals and publishing houses. These include Publius-Journal of Federalism, Party Politics, Representation, Journal of Legislative Studies, Swiss Political Science Review, Cluster Computing: Journal of Networks, Journal of Statistical Software, Software Tools and Applications, Análisis Político, El Profesional de la Información, as well as the Spanish journals Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas, Revista Española de Ciencia Política, and Revista de Estudios Políticos. Or Routledge, Oxford University Press, Sage, Springer or the Center for Sociological Research, among others.

But Pablo Oñate is not one of those academics concerned only with accumulating "impactful results." Throughout his career, he has consistently focused on creating networks and fostering collective work, both in Spain and abroad, leading research projects—or participating in other teams—and editing collective books resulting from the work of research networks. As examples, I will mention only the Comparative Parliamentary Research-Net (COMPARE-Net) and Parliaments in the Pandemic (PiP, of IPSA's Research Committee No. 8), his status as a fellow of the Institute for Parliamentary Research, or his participation in the ERASMUS+ projects EQUAM-India, MOTIVE-Vietnam, EQUAM-Latin America, and EQUAM-Tunisia, among others.

He has also focused on a more didactic and applied perspective of the profession, editing or contributing to student manuals and creating a software tool (successfully registered with the Intellectual Property Registry). This software tool allows for the calculation of up to 48 indices and indicators related to the electoral system and its proportionality and the dimensions of party systems—a software tool that was made available to the public on the CIS website—in an example of applied political science production, later included in the publication of a CIS Methodological Notebook.

Again, just as an example of this profuse research activity in a wide variety of topics that have become relevant as he progressed in his curricular trajectory, I would like to mention that he is currently the principal investigator of a project on the crisis of political representation and democratic ties (with 12 other researchers from 4 Spanish universities) and participates in one of the highly competitive projects of the National Plan for Public-Private Collaboration, to analyze the impact of artificial intelligence and big data on the design and analysis of public policies, in collaboration with researchers from two other universities and two technology and project development companies.

Of course, his intense academic commitment also extends to the field of teaching. Throughout his extensive career as a professor, he has taught a large number of courses in the fields of Political Science and Administration: more than 25 different courses, covering virtually all areas of Political Science. He has also, of course, taught various courses in numerous master's and doctoral programs, both at his own university and at other universities in Spain and abroad.

Again, let me just mention that for four years he was the coordinator of the Harvard-CIS Summer Seminar on Social and Political Research (2015-2018), which, as we all know, brought together 25 Spanish students and professors with top researchers in Political Science and Sociology from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and MIT. And, of course, he has supervised a significant number of doctoral theses (despite the fact that his university doesn't have a specific doctoral program in Political Science).

Pablo Oñate has also paid attention to what we might call the 'construction of an academic political science community': not only in networks and research projects, but in what could be described as institutional building. On the one hand, within the University, he has held various academic positions and participated in countless tribunals and commissions at the various universities he has 'inhabited' (Autonomous University of Madrid, Carlos III University of Madrid, and the University of Valencia). Again, I will use just one example: since he joined the University of Valencia in 2000, his Political Science Teaching Unit went from having two professors and teaching only three subjects, to having 14 full-time professors and 10 associate professors, who teach a large number of subjects in Political Science Programs, double degrees with Sociology and Law, as well as in the doctoral program at the Faculty of Law. And this without prejudice to his many other research and knowledge transfer activities already mentioned.

But alongside the 'building of an academic community in political science' at the University, Pablo Oñate's 'comprehensive' academic commitment has also led him to pay attention to the transfer of knowledge to society. I will mention just a few examples of this merit: he has been director of the University Research Institute of the Ortega y Gasset-Marañón Foundation (coordinating a large number of official university master's programs and various other programs), and also holds the position of academic director of the Foundation. Since 2013, he has been editor of the Spanish Journal of Sociological Research (REIS) and serves on several editorial boards of other leading journals. Since 2003, he has been director of the Political Science Collection of the Tirant lo Blanch publishing house, and since 2013, he has been a member of the Scientific Committee of this publishing house. He has also been an external advisor to ANECA for many years, focusing his work especially on the area of the Agency's international relations. He is the director of the Spanish chapter of the European Social Survey (ERIC). He has also been a regular contributor, as an expert evaluator for national agencies, to the Ibero-American System for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (SIACES). He has also worked as an election observer in Latin America, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Myanmar (collaborating with various international institutions and organizations—the UN, OSCE, the European Commission, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, and the Spanish government itself). In short, he has worked intensively to transfer the knowledge generated to society, successfully connecting the university with the society it is meant to serve.

Finally, I would like to mention that, in this effort to contribute to the development of Political Science and its institutionalization and internationalization, Pablo Oñate was Secretary General of the Spanish Association of Political Science and Administration for eight years (from 2005 to 2013), organizing the Spanish Congress of the Discipline in Valencia (in 2007) and participating in the Local Organizing Committee of the World Congress of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) in Madrid, with more than 3,000 participants, in 2012.

As Secretary General of AECPA, he was one of the founders of the European Confederation of Political Science Associations (ECPSA), which brought together 26 national political science associations across the continent, serving as vice president for five years and as president for another five (from 2013 to 2018).

Additionally, in 2018, he was elected to the Executive Committee of the International Political Science Association (IPSA), the global scientific association for the discipline, "the voice of Political Science in the world," as its motto states. In 2021, he was elected First Vice President and President-elect of IPSA, leading the Committee for Research and Training—coordinating the global association's 53 Research Committees, the eight Summer Schools in Techniques, Research and Methods, and the IPSA MOOCs Program.

At the IPSA World Congress in Buenos Aires in 2023, Pablo Oñate was sworn in as IPSA President, the first Spaniard to hold this position of extraordinary international standing in the discipline. In his capacity as President, he coordinates all the Executive Committee's subcommittees. He also led the organization of two global conferences, to mark IPSA's 75th anniversary in 2024, on topics of enormous relevance to our political systems (Multi-Level Governance, in Montreal, April 2024; and Democratization and Autocratization, in Lisbon, September 2024, each with hundreds of participants). He also launched the IPSA Work in Progress Sessions (IPSA-WiPS), an online conference for the systematic presentation and discussion of ongoing research from a planetary perspective. And, of course, he is leading the organization of the IPSA Political Science World Congress, to be held in Seoul in July 2025, with an estimated attendance of 3,000 researchers and approximately 850 panels and plenary sessions.

No Spaniard has ever enjoyed the exceptional international support and recognition to assume this unique responsibility, which such distinguished colleagues from other countries have held in the past.

In short, and with this I conclude, Professor Oñate belongs to that rare academic breed capable of excelling in each of the different facets of our work: research, teaching, knowledge transfer, management, etc. None of this would have been achieved were it not for his tenacity and personal effort, his innovative nature, and his entrepreneurial ability, a trait not always highly regarded but essential for the national and international expansion of our discipline. For someone like me, who has known him since I was a student, being able to attend this ceremony recognizing his many well-deserved merits is a source of enormous joy.

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