M. Steven Fish is a comparative political scientist who studies democracy and regime change in developing and post-communist countries, religion and politics, and constitutional systems and national legislatures. He is the author of Are Muslims Distinctive? A Look at the Evidence (Oxford, 2011). He also wrote Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics (Cambridge, 2005) — which received the Best Book Award of 2006 from the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association — and Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (Princeton, 1995). Fish is coauthor of The Handbook of National Legislatures: A Global Survey(Cambridge, 2009) and Post-communism and the Theory of Democracy (Princeton, 2001). Fish served as a Senior Fulbright Fellow and Visiting Professor at the Airlangga University, Surabaya, Indonesia, in 2007 and at the European University at St. Petersburg, in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2000-01. In 2005, he received the Distinguished Social Sciences Teaching Award of the Colleges of Letters and Science, UC Berkeley.