[2] Stein Rokkan was born on the Lofoten archipelago in the far north of Norway and raised in the nearby town of Narvik.
Rokkan completed his gymnasium years in 1939, and he received a magister artium in political philosophy from the University of Oslo in 1948.
[4] Rokkan then turned to empirical research, and studied at Columbia University, Chicago and the London School of Economics between 1949 and 1951.
[7] Over the years Rokkan was three times a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a visiting professor at various universities (Manchester, Stanford, Geneva, the London School of Economics, the Instituts d'études politiques in Paris.
Peter Flora notes that the "initial analysis of the origins of cleavage structures and their transformation into party systems appeared in 1965 ... in German" in a version that "carried Rokkan's name alone.
In turn, these big discontinuous changes could be seen as critical junctures because they generated social outcomes that subsequently remained "frozen" for extensive periods of time.
"[26] Rokkan has been described as "one of the world's leading social scientists since World War II",[27] "one of the great masters of comparative politics",[28] and "a leading international scholar during the second phase of the post-war social science with its foci on macro studies and international comparisons.
"[30] He influenced thinking about cleavage, comparative history, party systems and Catalan nationalism, among other topics.
The Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research has been awarded by the ISSC, the ECPR and the University of Bergen since 1981.