About

Ethan Bueno de Mesquita is the Dean and Sydney Stein Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, and a Faculty Associate in the University of Chicago Department of Political Science. He is a leading political scientist whose research applies game theoretic models to the study of conflict, political violence, national security, and electoral politics. He has also written extensively on methodological issues in the social sciences. Bueno de Mesquita writes and advises leaders in the public and private sectors on both national security matters and issues at the intersection of technology and society. Prior to assuming the role of dean in 2024, he served as Interim Dean and Deputy Dean of the Harris School since 2011, and held various leadership roles including chair of the Pearson Institute Advisory Council and co-chair of Harris’ Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Board. He is a member of the board of directors of the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and has served on the steering committee responsible for establishing the PhD in Political Economy, as well as on the Obama Presidential Center Faculty Partnership Advisory Committee. His academic work includes authorship of several books and numerous articles in political science and economics, and his research has been supported by notable institutions such as the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the United States Institute of Peace. Ethan Bueno de Mesquita earned his AB from the University of Chicago in 1996, and his MA (2000) and PhD (2003) in political science from Harvard University.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Social psychology
• Economics
• Psychology
• Law
• Computer Security
• Sociology
• Management science
• Econometrics
• Statistics
• Mathematics
• Demographic economics
• Epistemology
• Operations research
• Mathematical economics
• Pure mathematics
• Macroeconomics
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Hold-Up, Innovation, and Platform Governance

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Partisan Traps

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Partisan Traps

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Social Norms and Social Change

  Quarterly Journal of Political Science · 2023-05-04 · 9 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We study how social norms affect social change in a setting where people have both internal motivations and a desire to conform. We distinguish two kinds of internal motivations: common values in which people wish to behave consistent with some evolving, uncertain ground truth and private values in which individuals genuinely disagree about proper behavior for non-informational reasons. In both settings aggregate behavior changes more slowly than beliefs about proper behavior, and increased information reduces such inertia. Inertia is a more severe problem, but information is more effective, when values are common rather than private. In this common-values setting, we identify conditions under which increased information leads to a normative improvement. Finally, we elucidate empirical implications for the relationships between measures of attitudes, behavior, and descriptive norms. The average perceived descriptive norm is lower than the average action which is lower than the average belief about the right action (injunctive norm). Thus, behavioral forecasts based on survey answers about perceived descriptive or injunctive norms are under-and over-estimates, respectively.

  PublisherDOI

• The Minimal Effects of Public Health Campaigns on Travel During the COVID-19 Pandemic

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2023-09-19

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• The Minimal Effects of Public Health Campaigns on Travel During the COVID-19 Pandemic

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2023-09-19

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• The Minimal Effects of Public Health Campaigns on Travel During the COVID-19 Pandemic

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2023-09-19

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• From Investiture to Worms: European Development and the Rise of Political Authority

  The Journal of Politics · 2023-01-24 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author

  The endogenous consequences of competition between the Roman Catholic Church and lay political rulers set into motion by the Investiture Controversy contribute new insights into European economic, political, and religious development. The resolution of the Investiture Controversy in the concordats of London (1107), Paris (1107), and Worms (1122) resulted in an increase in the bargaining power of lay rulers over the selection of bishops in wealthier dioceses relative to poorer dioceses. Empirical evidence exploiting the timing of the adoption of the concordats interacted with a variety of time-invariant measures of diocesan wealth yields results consistent with this account—adoption of the concordats led bishops to become more aligned with lay political authorities in wealthier dioceses relative to poorer dioceses. These findings suggest the incentives created by the concordats played a role, hundreds of years before the Protestant Reformation, in the rise of lay political authority and its association with economic prosperity.

  PublisherDOI

• Partisan Traps

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2023-11-01 · 4 citations

  reportOpen access1st author

  Electoral incentives may lead policymakers to eschew opportunities for common-interest reform, focusing instead on zero-sum, partisan policymaking.By forgoing opportunities for commoninterest reforms, incumbents may convince their constituents that such reforms are rarely feasible, so that policymaking is primarily about zero-sum, partisan conflict.Voters with such beliefs vote based on ideological alignment, rather than factors such as quality or honesty.This is electorally beneficial for incumbents, who are typically ideologically aligned with their constituents.We capture this logic in an infinite horizon model and characterize the resulting dynamics of politics and policymaking.Equilibrium exhibits partisan traps---voters are pessimistic about commoninterest opportunities, politicians behave in a purely partisan manner that shuts down voter learning, and ideologically aligned incumbents are consistently reelected.Partisan traps often occur in equilibrium even when common-interest reforms are in fact frequently feasible.The model shows how elite and mass polarization are intertwined, with politicians engaging in strategically polarized and polarizing behavior which leads to pessimistic beliefs among voters, who come to perceive there to be little political common ground.

  PublisherDOI

• Modeling Theories of Women's Underrepresentation in Elections

  American Journal of Political Science · 2023 · 22 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Demographic economics
  • Social psychology

  Abstract Research on women candidates in American elections uncovers four key facts: Women (i) are underrepresented among candidates, (ii) are underrepresented among office holders, (iii) perform better in office, and (iv) win open seats at equal rates to men. Scholars offer two types of explanations: Women are less willing to run than men, due to differential costs or a gap in self‐perceived qualification, or voters discriminate at the ballot box. We formally model these mechanisms. Lower willingness to run predicts the first three facts but not the fourth. Voter discrimination at the ballot box predicts the first three facts and creates competing effects with respect to the fourth. Thus, the major stylized facts cannot be explained without voter discrimination, whether overt or more subtle. We explore whether a close‐election regression discontinuity distinguishes the mechanisms; surprisingly, it does not.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research on the Nature of Electoral Accountability

  NSF · $90k · 2008–2012

Frequent coauthors

• Scott Ashworth

  University of Chicago

  46 shared

• Christopher R. Berry

  University of Chicago

  29 shared

• Mehdi Shadmehr

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  8 shared

• Shanna Rose

  Claremont McKenna College

  4 shared

• Matthew Stephenson

  4 shared

• Amanda Friedenberg

  4 shared

• James Alt

  University of California, Davis

  4 shared

• Benjamin Shaver

  3 shared

Education

• B.A., Political Science

  The University of Chicago

  1996