Daniel Treisman

Professor of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles
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.), he has published six books and many articles in leading political science and economics journals including The American Political Science Review and The American Economic Review, as well as in public affairs journals such as Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy.

His research focuses on Russian politics and economics as well as comparative political economy, including in particular the analysis of democratization, the politics of authoritarian states, political decentralization, and corruption.

A former editor of The American Political Science Review, he has served as associate editor or on the editorial boards of the journals Post-Soviet Affairs, Comparative Political Studies, Economics and Politics, Politeia, and the Russian Journal of Economics.

He has served as a consultant for the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and USAID. In Russia, he has been a member of the International Advisory Committee of the Higher School of Economics and a member of the Jury of the National Prize in Applied Economics. At UCLA, he has served as acting director of the Center for European and Russian Studies.

He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, as well as a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna), and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford). He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

His latest book, co-authored with Sergei Guriev, Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press, 2022), was one of the “Best Books of 2022” (The New Yorker, Foreign Affairs), “Best Political Books of 2022” (Financial Times), and “Books That Made Us Think in 2022” (The Atlantic, Moment). It has been translated into 14 languages. The Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev (The Free Press, 2011) was one of the Financial Times’ “Best Political Books of 2011.” It won the Prix Guido et Maruccia Zerilli-Marimo de l’Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, Paris, and the Arthur Ross Book Prize Bronze Medal, New York.

Since 2014, he has been the director of the Russia Political Insight Project, an international collaboration funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, to investigate political decisionmaking in Putin’s Russia. This resulted in the publication of The New Autocracy: Information, Politics, and Policy in Putin’s Russia (Brookings Institution Press 2018).