Peter Flora (*3 March 1944, in Innsbruck, Tyrol, Austria) is an Austrian citizen and taught until his retirement in spring 2009 as a professor of sociology at the University of Mannheim.
[1] His years as an assistant from 1969 to 1973, he completed at the Universities of Frankfurt am Main and Mannheim at the chair of Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Zapf; both together organized the QUAM-project (Quantitative Model of Modernization).
Based on data collected in this project, he received a doctorate in 1972 at the University of Constance on a subject which would occupy him as well as his supervisor Wolfgang Zapf for many years: modernization research.
Results of this research project consisted of a larger number of presentations, contributions to journals and books, the working paper series of the HIWED-Reports, two dissertations and finally the two-volume data handbook State, Economy, and Society in Western Europe 1815–1975, published in 1983 and 1987 respectively.
Only three years after receiving his doctoral degree, in 1976 at the age of 32, Peter Flora has been qualified for lecturing in sociology at the University of Mannheim with a habilitation thesis on Modernization and the Development of the European Welfare States.
In 1982, Peter Flora accepted a call by the Faculty for Social Sciences of the University of Mannheim, to become the successor of M. Rainer Lepsius.
Thus, he responsibly wrote an application in order to establish a Mannheim Centre for the Social Sciences which was set up since 1989 by means from the Government of the Land Baden-Württemberg.
From 1989 to 1993, Flora acted as founding director of the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) of today and accomplished here the decisive pioneering work.
In order to achieve this goal, first all publications of Rokkan's publications were collected and made machine-readable by scanning them (building what is today the Stein Rokkan-archive), with the intention to produce a summarizing book (State Formation, Nation-Building, and Mass Politics in Europe: The Theory of Stein Rokkan.
Participants in this conference were: Peter Flora, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Juan Linz, Erik Allardt, Richard Rose, Seymour Martin Lipset, Mattei Dogan, Philippe C. Schmitter, Bernd Schulte, Peter Graf von Kielmansegg, Klaus von Beyme, Stein Ugelvik Larsen, Wlodzimierz Wesolowski, M. Rainer Lepsius, Stein Kuhnle, Wolfgang Streeck, Max Kaase, Franz Urban Pappi, and Hans-Dieter Klingemann.
The systematic comparison of societies in a historical perspective has received decisive impulses from his publications, by his activities in official positions of the sociological profession and as academic teacher, and furthermore by his pioneering role when establishing the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research.