He contributed to build and then served as Director of the School of International Studies at University of Trento in the period 2006-2009. He was the Editor of the Italian Journal of Political Science (Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica)[4] in the period 2004-2009. He is also an editorialist for the Italian newspaper "Il Sole 24 ore".[5] For his editorials, he was awarded the “Altiero Spinelli Prize 2017”.
Fabbrini was born in Pesaro. He did his undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Trento, Italy. Starting his university studies in 1969, he took the four years degree in Sociology in 1973, graduating with laude with a dissertation on the role of the state in Italian post-second world war economic miracle. Because there was not yet a doctoral program in Italy in the 1970s, he got a three years scholarship (1974–1977), equivalent to a Ph.D. program, for specializing in political economy. His research concerned the place of the state and politics in the theories of classical political economists, thus published in the 1977 dissertation on “Thinking Over the Theory of Value of Classical Political Economists”.
He then got the equivalent of a four years post-doc fellowship (1977–1981) to investigate “The political economy of the welfare state”, researching at the Department of Economics, Cambridge University, United Kingdom and Department of Economics at Trento University. In the beginning of the 1980s, thanks to a NATO Fellowship and an Italian CNR Scholarship, he researched for three years at the University of California at Riverside and Berkeley. Since the beginning of the 1990s he has taught periodically at the University of California at Berkeley, Department of Political Science and Institute of Governmental Studies.
He has published fifteen books, two co-authored books and fourteen edited or co-edited books or journals’ special issues, and more than two hundred scientific articles and essays in seven languages in comparative and European government and politics, American government and politics, international relations and foreign policy, Italian government and politics, and political theory. According to a review in 2010:[6]
In books and articles over the last decade, Italian political scientist Sergio Fabbrini has been scrambling to understand [the] recent ebb and flow in transatlantic relations. Anti-Americanism in Europe and anti-Europeanism in the United States, Fabbrini argues in America and Its Critics, have challenged the viability of NATO and, prior to Obama’s election, called into question the ability to cooperate on global concerns from terrorism to global warming. At the same time, however, Fabbrini has devoted several articles and an entire book, Compound Democracies, to the thesis that the United States and Europe are converging at an institutional level as examples of what he calls “compound democracies.” Over the long term, in other words, the two political systems are becoming more alike even as the politicians themselves, in the short term, articulate a different set of political values.
Regarding his main recent contributions: (1) he brought the analysis of the European Union (EU) back to the comparative framework; (2) he showed that the EU cannot be analyzed with the categories utilized for nation states; (3) he developed a more comprehensive distinction between national democracies on the basis of their functional logic and institutional structure; (4) he elaborated the original model of ‘compound democracy’[7] for explaining the functioning logic and the institutional structure of democratic unions of states (as the EU, but also the United States and Switzerland), thus distinguishing between unions of states and nation states; (5) he defined an unprecedented model for understanding political leadership in contemporary governmental systems.
‘Decoupling and Federalizing: Europe after the Multiple Crises’, in Mark Harwood, Stefan Moncada and Roderick Pace (eds.), The Future of the European Union: Demisting the Debate, University of Malta: The Institute of European Studies, 2020, pp. 28–41
(with Simona Piattoni, eds.), Italy in the EU: Pigmy or Giant? The role of Italian actors in the EU policy-making. Special issue of Modern Italy, 9, n.2, November 2004.