Daniel Treisman

Daniel Treisman is a 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 Oxford University (B.A. Hons.) and Harvard University (Ph.D. 1995), he has published five books and many articles in journals that range from The American Political Science Review and The American Economic Review to Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. His research focuses on Russian politics and economics as well as 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 Hoover Institution (Stanford) and the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna), as well as receiving fellowships from the German Marshall Fund of the US and the Smith Richardson Foundation. In the 2021-22 academic year, he is a visiting fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. Outside academia, he has been a consultant for the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and USAID. In Russia, he has served on the International Advisory Committee of the Higher School of Economics and as a member of the Jury of the National Prize in Applied Economics.

Treisman’s latest book, co-authored with Sergei Guriev, is Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press, 2022). The Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev (The Free Press, 2011) was one of the Financial Times’s “Best Political Books of 2011.”