Gary Cox:

About

Gary W. Cox is the William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He holds a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology, earned in 1983, and a B.S. in History from the same institution, completed in 1978. Cox has authored numerous articles in the areas of legislative and electoral politics and is the author of several influential books, including The Efficient Secret, which won the 1983 Samuel H Beer dissertation prize and the 2003 George H Hallett Award; Making Votes Count, recipient of the 1998 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, the 1998 Luebbert Prize, and the 2007 George H Hallett Award; and Setting the Agenda, which received the 2006 Leon D. Epstein Book Award. He is also the co-author of Legislative Leviathan, which won the 1993 Richard F Fenno Prize, and Marketing Sovereign Promises, awarded the William Riker Prize in 2016. Cox is a former Guggenheim Fellow and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. His research interests include American Politics, Comparative Politics, and Political Methodology.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Political economy
• Economics
• Business
• Public economics
• Microeconomics
• Finance
• Public relations

Selected publications

• Seniority-Based Nominations and Political Careers

  American Political Science Review · 2020 · 132 citations

  This paper investigates party use of seniority systems to allocate nominations for elected and appointed offices. Such systems, which can regulate party members’ access to offices at multiple levels of their careers, are defined by two main rules or norms: an incumbent re-nomination norm and a seniority progression norm. Using comprehensive electoral and candidate data from Norwegian local and national elections from 1945 to 2019, we find systematic patterns consistent with these two norms. Our…

  DOI

• Nonunitary Parties, Government Formation, and Gamson’s Law

  American Political Science Review · 2021-04-26 · 37 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Following the coalition literature highlighting intraparty politics (e.g., Giannetti and Benoit 2009; Laver 1999; Strøm 2003), I address the well-known “portfolio allocation paradox” (Warwick and Druckman 2006) by introducing a new model of government formation based on two main assumptions. First, no actor has a structural advantage in the negotiations leading to government formation. Second, all actors who can deprive the coalition of a majority (or other critical threshold size) must be inclu…

  PublisherDOI

• Window of Opportunity: War and the Origins of Parliament

  British Journal of Political Science · 2023-05-17 · 24 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  Abstract Two important puzzles characterize the development of pre-modern Eurasian polities. First, most rulers convened councils of nobles, but only European monarchs expanded them to create parliaments. Second, war was common throughout Eurasia, but only in Europe did it correlate with the formation of parliaments. We advance a new argument about the emergence of parliaments that accounts for both stylized facts while integrating the literature highlighting the rulers' need to finance wars wit…

  PublisherDOI

• Moral hazard in electoral teams: List rank and campaign effort

  Journal of Public Economics · 2021 · 24 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Political Economy of Suffrage Reform: The Great Reform Act of 1832

  Journal of Historical Political Economy · 2023-05-17 · 19 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We argue that the Great Reform Act’s suffrage provisions were part of a broader effort to constrain the executive, thereby enabling an expansion in the state’s repressive capacity. When they came to power, the Whigs first increased parliament’s power over the purse; and then bolstered its independence from the monarch and allied patronal peers by reforming parliamentary elections. These reforms to constrain the executive were followed almost immediately by substantial investments in the state’s…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Mathew D. McCubbins

  Duke University

  358 shared

• Arend Lijphart

  167 shared

• Jon H. Fiva

  BI Norwegian Business School

  165 shared

• Alexandra Cirone

  152 shared

• Chí Huang

  Government Communications Headquarters

  49 shared

• Alexander C. Tan

  49 shared

• Nathan Beaulieu Batto

  49 shared

• Joseph Cooper

  29 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Political Science

  Stanford University

  1983

• B.A., Political Science

  University of California, Berkeley

  1977

Awards & honors

• The Efficient Secret (winner of the 1983 Samuel H Beer disse…
• The Efficient Secret (winner of the 2003 George H Hallett Aw…
• Legislative Leviathan (winner of the 1993 Richard F Fenno Pr…
• Making Votes Count (winner of the 1998 Woodrow Wilson Founda…
• Making Votes Count (winner of the 1998 Luebbert Prize)

Similar researchers at Stanford University

• Jon Krosnick:h-95
• Barry R. Weingast:h-79
• Shanto Iyengar:h-70