James Alt

James Alt

Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government, Emeritus, Department of Government
James Alt

James E. Alt is the Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government, Emeritus. His current interests are in comparative political economy; the interaction of voters, political parties, budget and other political institutions, financial markets, and fiscal policies in industrial democracies. His recent research analyzes institutional transparency, accountability and corruption, and fiscal policy outcomes in OECD countries and US states. He is author, co-author, or editor of The Politics of Economic Decline (Cambridge University Press, 1979, reissued 2009), Political Economics (University of California Press, 1983), Cabinet Studies (Macmillan, 1975), Advances in Quantitative Methods (Elsevier, 1980),Perspectives on Positive Political Economy (Cambridge University Press, 1990), Competition and Cooperation (Russell Sage, 1999) and Positive Changes in Political Science (Michigan, 2007). He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals, including "Partisan Dealignment in Britain 1964-1974" in the British Journal of Political Science, "Political Parties, World Demand, and Unemployment" in the American Political Science Review, "Divided Government, Fiscal Institutions, and Deficits: Evidence from the States," in the American Political Science Review, "Fiscal Policy Outcomes and Electoral Accountability in American States," in the American Political Science Review, and “Disentangling Accountability and Competence in Elections: Evidence from U.S. Term Limits,” in the Journal of Politics. He is the founding director of the Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences, now the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. He is or has been a member of the editorial boards of the American Political Science ReviewAmerican Journal of Political ScienceBritish Journal of Political ScienceJournal of Politics, Political Studies, and other journals, and has been a member of the Political Science Panel of the National Science Foundation. He was a Guggenheim Fellow 1997-98 and a Senior Research Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford from 2007-2011. Alt is an International Fellow of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, London, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.

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