Scott Ashworth
Homer J. Livingston Professor
Harris School of Public Policy

Ashworth uses game-theoretic models to study a variety of issues in political science, with a special emphasis on campaigns and elections. His current research uses ideas from contract theory to explore foundational and applied questions in the theory of political accountability.

Christopher Berry
William J. and Alicia Townsend Friedman Professor of Political Science
Harris School of Public Policy

Berry’s research interests include metropolitan governance, the politics of public finance, and intergovernmental fiscal relations. He is the author of Imperfect Union: Representation and Taxation in Multilevel Governments (Cambridge UP, 2010), winner of the Best Book Award in Urban Politics from the American Political Science Association, and many other scholarly publications.

Christopher Blattman
Ramalee E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies in Political Science
The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts
Harris School of Public Policy

As an economist and political scientist, Blattman uses field studies, surveys, natural experiments, and field experiments to study the dynamics of poverty and participation, and to consider which development programs work and why. A number of studies are presently underway in Uganda and Liberia, where he is exploring new strategies to alleviate poverty and is exploring how these strategies impact violence, unrest, and other social and political behavior.

Ethan Bueno de Mesquita
Sydney Stein Professor and Interim Dean
Harris School of Public Policy

Bueno de Mesquita’s research focuses on applications of game theoretic models to a variety of political phenomena, including conflict, political violence, and electoral accountability. He has also written extensively on methodological issues concerning the relationship between theory and empirics in the social sciences.

Oeindrila Dube
Philip K. Pearson Professor
Harris School of Public Policy

Dube’s research focuses on the political economy of development. She studies topics like the link between poverty and conflict and the role of trust and institutions in the spread of epidemics. In recent work, she has examined how community involvement affected responses to the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone. In other current projects, Dube uses big data to understand radicalization in the Middle East, and she experimentally examines strategies for improving community-police relations in the United States.

Wioletta Dziuda
Associate Professor and Deputy Dean
Harris School of Public Policy

Dziuda’s main interests lie in applied game theory, political economy, and the economics of information. Her current research focuses on analyzing how legislative bargaining affects the nature and the efficiency of policies. Dziuda is also interested in the strategic underpinnings of political scandals and their consequences for accountability.

Andrew Eggers
Professor
Department of Political Science

Eggers is a political scientist whose research focuses on electoral systems, corruption/accountability, the relationship between money and politics, and political development in the U.S., Britain, and France. He also has an interest in research methodology.

Alexander Fouirnaies
Assistant Professor
Harris School of Public Policy

Fouirnaies concentrates on the political economy of elections. Most of his research focuses on how money and the media shape elections and affect representation and accountability. Methodologically, Fouirnaies has an interest in causal inference and applied econometrics.  Most of his projects use natural experiments to uncover causal relations between political and economic variables.

Anthony Fowler
Professor
Harris School of Public Policy

Fowler’s research applies econometric methods for causal inference to questions in political science, with particular emphasis on elections and political representation. Specific interests include the causes and consequences of unequal voter turnout, explanations for incumbent success, the politics of policymaking in legislatures, and the credibility of empirical research.

Scott Gehlbach
Elise and Jack Lipsey Professor
Director, PhD Program in Political Economy
Department of Political Science and Harris School of Public Policy

Motivated by the contemporary and historical experience of Russia and neighboring states, Gehlbach has made numerous contributions to the study of autocracy, economic reform, political connections, and other important topics in political economy. His widely used textbook Formal Models of Domestic Politics (Cambridge University Press, Analytical Methods for Social Research) is now available in a second edition.

Robert Gulotty
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science

Gulotty’s research interests include international political economy and political methodology. His first book project is Governing Trade Beyond Tariffs: The Politics of Multinational Production and its Implications for International Cooperation. He is also engaged in research on the origins of the international trade regime and the effects of domestic institutions on foreign economic policymaking.

William Howell
Sydney Stein Professor in American Politics, Harris School of Public Polic

Howell has written widely on separation-of-powers issues and American political institutions, especially the presidency. He currently is working on research projects on separation of powers issues, the origins of political authority, and the normative foundations of executive power.

Howell’s most recent book (with Terry Moe) is Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy (University of Chicago, 2020). His research also has appeared in numerous professional journals and edited volumes.

Zhaotian Luo
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science

Luo is a formal theorist with a broad substantive interest in political institutions and the political economy of nondemocracies. He specializes in developing and applying game theoretic models to explain interactions among political actors as well as the foundations and performance of political institutions. His current research centers on the role of information in politics.

Luis Martinez
Assistant Professor
Harris School of Public Policy

Martinez’s main research interest is in the analysis of political institutions in developing countries, with a regional focus on Latin America. Some of his work is centered around authoritarian regimes, trying to detect the manipulation of information and examining the consequences of exposure to state repression. In other work, he has studied the functioning of democracy in settings with weak institutions, analyzing factors that affect electoral participation and government performance. A third line of research focuses on civil conflict, studying the impact of cross-border safe havens on insurgent violence and the effect of peace on agricultural investment.

Daniel Moskowitz
Assistant Professor
Harris School of Public Policy

Moskowitz’s research examines how the media and electoral institutions shape the behavior of voters and elite actors, and it assesses the consequences of these institutions on accountability and political representation. In particular, his research focuses on electoral politics, redistricting, media and politics, partisan polarization, the U.S. Congress, and political parties.

Roger Myerson
David L. Pearson Distinguished Service Professor of Global Conflict Studies
Harris School of Public Policy and Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics

Myerson has made seminal contributions to the fields of economics and political science. In game theory, he introduced refinements of Nash’s equilibrium concept, and he developed techniques to characterize the effects of communication among rational agents who have different information. His analysis of incentive constraints in economic communication introduced several fundamental concepts that are now widely used in economic analysis, including the revelation principle and the revenue-equivalence theorem in auctions and bargaining. Myerson has also applied game-theoretic tools to political science, analyzing how political incentives can be affected by different electoral systems and constitutional structures.

Monika Nalepa
Professor
Department of Political Science

With a focus on post-communist Europe, Nalepa’s research interests include transitional justice, parties and legislatures, and game-theoretic approaches to comparative politics. Her first book, Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe, was published in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics Series and received the Best Book award from the Comparative Democratization section of the APSA and the Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award from the Political Organizations and Parties section of the APSA. She has just completed her second book, Ritual Sacrifices: Transitional Justice and the Fate of Post-authoritarian Elites.

James Robinson
The Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies
Director, The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts
Harris School of Public Policy

A prominent political scientist and economist, Robinson has conducted influential research in the field of political and economic development and the factors that are the root causes of conflict. His work explores the underlying relationship between poverty and the institutions of a society and how institutions emerge out of political conflicts.

Konstantin Sonin
John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor
Harris School of Public Policy

Sonin’s interests include political economics, development, and economic theory. His papers have been published in leading academic journals in economics and political science.

Austin Wright
Assistant Professor
Harris School of Public Policy

Wright’s research leverages microlevel data to study the political economy of conflict and crime in Afghanistan, Colombia, Indonesia, and Iraq. His work is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Niehaus Center for Global Governance, the Asia Foundation, and the World Bank. He received his BA in Government and Sociology and BS in Communication Sciences from The University of Texas at Austin and his MA and PhD in Politics from Princeton University.

Adam Zelizer
Assistant Professor
Harris School of Public Policy 

Zelizer studies legislative politics, with a focus on causal inference. His research examines how legislators make decisions – for example, how they acquire expertise from policy research and influence one another through deliberation – and the effects of individual decision-making processes on policy outcomes. One goal of this research is to figure out which legislative processes work, in the sense of leading to more informed, effective, and broadly-supported public policies, and which don’t.