David Treisman is professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. A graduate of the University of Oxford (BA, Hons.) and Harvard University (PhD), he has published five books and many articles in leading political science and economics journals.
His research focuses on Russian politics and economics as well as on comparative political economy, including the analysis of democratization, the politics of authoritarian states, political decentralization, and corruption. A former lead editor of the American Political Science Review, he has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna), as well as at the Hoover Institution and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (both at Stanford University).
Treisman’s book The Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev (Free Press, 2011) was one of the Financial Times’s “Best Political Books of 2011.” His latest book, coauthored with Sergei Guriev, is Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press, 2022).
His project, “Diagnosing Democratic Frailty: What the History of Free Government Reveals about Today’s Vulnerabilities,” aims to assess threats to today’s democracies — and devise strategies to strengthen them — by exploring the historical processes through which they emerged. Collecting new empirical data, it will relate the fragility and resilience of existing democracies to their institutional genealogy — the timing and order in which different subcomponents developed.
Twitter:
@dstreisman
www.danieltreisman.org
