Description:

Please join the Comparative Politics Workshop as they host Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, Sydney Stein Professor and Deputy Dean at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, for a presentation on his new book Theory and Credibility.

The session will take place in Scott Hall 212 with an option for virtual attendance. Lunch will be served. 

The credibility revolution, with its emphasis on empirical methods for causal inference, has led to concerns among scholars that the canonical questions about politics and society are being neglected because they are no longer deemed answerable. Theory and Credibility stakes out an opposing view—presenting a new vision of how, working together, the credibility revolution and formal theory can advance social scientific inquiry.

BIO

Ethan Bueno de Mesquita is the Sydney Stein Professor and Deputy Dean at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. His 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.

He is the author or co-author of Political Economy for Public Policy, Theory and Credibility, and Thinking Clearly with Data (all from Princeton University Press) as well as many articles in both political science and economics. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the United States Institute of Peace.

Before coming to the University of Chicago, Ethan taught in the political science department at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his BA from the University of Chicago in 1996 and his MA and PhD from Harvard University in 2003.