Jonathan Rodden

Professor of Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
Jonathan Rodden
Jonathan Rodden is a professor in the political science department at Stanford who works on the comparative political economy of institutions. He has written several articles and three books on federalism and fiscal decentralization. One of those books, "Hamilton’s Paradox: The Promise and Peril of Fiscal Federalism," was the recipient of the Gregory Luebbert Prize for the best book in comparative politics in 2007. He works with institutions including the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, USAID, and the European Parliament on issues related to fiscal decentralization and federalism.

He has also written papers on the geographic distribution of political preferences within countries, legislative bargaining, the distribution of budgetary transfers across regions, and the historical origins of political institutions. He has written a series of papers applying tools from mathematics and computer science to questions about redistricting, culminating in a 2019 book called "Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide" (Basic Books). Rodden has also embarked on an inter-disciplinary collaborative project focused on handgun acquisition.

Rodden received his PhD from Yale University and his BA from the University of Michigan, and was a Fulbright student at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 2007, he was the Ford Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Other Affiliation:
Director of the Spatial Social Science Lab at Stanford

Contact

Office
Encina Hall Central, Room 444

Office Hours

Tuesdays, 12:00pm - 2:00pm and By Appointment

Research Interests

Research Area(s)