Giovanni Sartori

Giovanni Sartori (; 13 May 1924 – 4 April 2017) was an Italian political scientist who specialized in the study of democracy and comparative politics.
Biography.
Born in Florence in 1924, Sartori began his academic career as a lecturer in the History of Modern Philosophy. He founded the first modern Political Science academic post in Italy, and was Dean of the newly formed University of Florence's Department of Political Science. Sartori served as Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University from 1979 to 1994 and was appointed Professor Emeritus.
He was a recipient of a Prince of Asturias Award (Social Sciences area) in 2005 and of the Karl Deutsch Award in 2009. of the International Political Science Association (IPSA), which honours a prominent scholar engaged in the cross-disciplinary research.
Research.
Sartori's interests were wide ranging, but his lasting contributions were largely on political parties, constitutional design, and perhaps most significantly, concept analysis. Sartori was deeply interested in the formation, analysis, and use of political concepts. He observed that political science, for better or worse, lacked the coordination in terminology that he presumed to exist in the physical and biological sciences. He encouraged a more "intentional" use of concepts, with the objective of furthering a shared understanding of ideas. In 1970, he and others established the first permanent research committee of the newly created International Political Science Association (IPSA). The committee, Research Committee on Concepts and Methods (RC 01), was intended to ameliorate the "Tower of Babel problem" in political science, and is still active. 
Sartori's 1970 article "Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics" published in "The American Political Science Review" is prominent in the field, leading Gary Goertz to write, "There are few articles in political science that deserve the predicate "classic," but Sartori's ... merits the label." Sartori's notions of "conceptual traveling" (the application of a concept from one case to a new case) and "conceptual stretching" (the mismatch that happens when a concept does not fit a new case) is influential in social science methodology. Conceptual stretching is frequently used as a criticism of studies that employ large-N quantitative analysis.
Sartori was also a regular contributor, as an op-ed writer, of the leading Italian newspaper "Corriere della Sera". In 1971 he founded and edited the periodical "Italian Political Science Review".
In 2015, he received a mexican "venera" of the Order of the Aztec Eagle from president Enrique Peña Nieto.
Sartori died at the age of 92 in Rome from throat cancer on 4 April 2017.
Further reading.
Three books deal with the work of Sartori: