Curriculum Vitae:

Dr. Simona Kukovič is Associate Professor of Political Science and works as a lecturer at the School of Advanced Social Studies. Dr. Kukovič’s area of expertise is political and administrative leadership at the local level. She also conducts research in the fields of leadership, comparative regional and local government, local democracy and participation, local and regional development, public administration, and administrative and political processes and institutions. She is the Slovenian representative in the COST networks, General Secretary and member of the executive board of the Central European Political Science Association (CEPSA) and general editor of the international scientific journal Journal of Comparative Politics.

In 2024, dr. Kukovič successfully completed specialisation at Yale University (Connecticut, USA), School of Management in the Leadership Programme.

Dr. Kukovič has been a visiting professor/researcher at several universities, including DeMontfort University, Leicester, UK (2015), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA (2018), Paris Lodron University Salzburg, Austria (2018-2019), and Montana State University, Montana, USA (2022). She was the head of the postdoctoral project entitled “Leading the Locality: Bureaucratisation of Politics or Politicisation of Bureaucracy?” (2018-2020) and five bilateral projects between the Republic of Slovenia and the USA, Montenegro, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In 2022, Dr. Kukovič was awarded the title of Jean Monnet Professor. In 2022-2024, she holds the Jean Monnet Chair, as part of which she also founded the Summer Leadership Academy. In 2024, she became the head of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence.

She is the (co-)author of several scientific publications, including the monographs “Slovenian Politics and the State” and “The Peculiar Evolution of Slovenian Local Government” (both published by Rowman & Littlefield, USA) and “Political System of Slovenia” (Sampark, Calcutta, India). She is the editor of a book entitled “The rise of populism in Central and Eastern Europe”, published by Edward Elgar, UK. In Slovenia, she is known for her academic work in the field of local leadership and local self-government. She is also the creator of the “Municipal Administrative Capacity” quality standard.

The entire bibliography is available in the Cobiss/Sicris system (www.sicris.si) under the researcher’s registration number 33786.