Grigorij Mesežnikov is a graduate of the Faculty of Arts at Moscow State University (MGU). Between 1983 and 1993, he worked at Comenius University in Bratislava; from 1993 to 1997, he served at the Political Science Institute at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. He is a founding member of IVO, which he joined full-time in June 1997. In 1999, he became the Institute’s president. He has published expert studies on party systems’ development and political aspects of transformation in post-communist societies in various monographs, collections and scholarly journals in Slovakia and other countries. He regularly contributes analyses of Slovakia’s political scene to domestic and foreign media. Since 1993, he has been an external correspondent for Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe. He has co-edited and co-authored a number of books, including the *Global Reports on Slovakia *(1995 – 2011), the annually published comprehensive analysis of country’s development in all relevant sectors of society. He was a key author of the report on Slovakia in *Nations  in Transit* published by Freedom House (1998 – 2014). In 2006 he was awarded by Reagan-Fascell Fellowship by the National Endowment for Democracy (Washington, D.C.), in 2012 he was a research fellow of Taiwan Fellowship program at the Department of Political Science of National Taiwan University in Taipei.