Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, PhD
Associate Professor, Harris SchoolCo-Director, Program on Political Institutions
Ethan Bueno de Mesquita is an associate professor in the Harris School and co-director of the Program on Political Institutions. His research applies game theoretic models to a variety of political phenomena including terrorism, elections and representation, and law and politics.
Bueno de Mesquita's current research focuses on how terrorists use violence to coordinate mass publics to mobilize against a government. He has also studied terrorist recruitment, the sources of internal division and internecine violence within terrorist organizations, government-terrorist negotiations, and counterterrorism policy.
In the areas of elections and representation, Bueno de Mesquita's ongoing work examines how changes in institutional and electoral environments affect electoral and policy outcomes including local public goods provision, 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 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 was an assistant professor in the department of political science at Washington University in St. Louis and spent a year as 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 work has been funded by the National Science Foundation 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
