Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, PhD
Professor, Harris SchoolCo-Director, Program on Political Institutions
Ethan Bueno de Mesquita is a professor and academic director for the faculty in the Harris School and is co-director of the Program on Political Institutions. He is an applied game theorist whose research focuses on political violence—terrorism and insurgency—and on democratic accountability. His writing in these areas appears in numerous leading scholarly journals in both political science and economics.
Bueno de Mesquita's current research focuses on rebel tactics. In particular, it asks when rebels employ terrorist and other guerrilla tactics and when they focus on more traditional forms of war fighting. He has also studied terrorist recruitment, the sources of internal division and internecine violence within terrorist organizations, the use of terrorism to spark large-scale revolutionary mobilization, peace processes, and counterterrorism policy.
Bueno de Mesquita's work on accountability examines how changes in institutional and electoral environments affect political and policy outcomes including public goods provision, the quality of fiscal management, the incumbency advantage, corruption, and party strength. He is also concerned with more foundational questions regarding the nature of representation and accountability in democratic systems. Bueno de Mesquita has also written on several topics in law and politics, including the emergence of judicial norms such as deference to precedent, the effect of formal legal institutions on informal economic and social networks, and judicial oversight of the bureaucracy.
Before coming to the Harris School, Bueno de Mesquita taught in the department of political science at Washington University in St. Louis and was a Lady Davis Fellow in political science and visiting fellow in the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the United States Institute of Peace. Bueno de Mesquita received his BA in political science from the University of Chicago and his MA and PhD in political science from Harvard.
Courses
Contact Information
1155 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637
Suite 108
E-mail: bdm@uchicago.edu
Phone: 773-834-9874
