Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University

Kenneth Shepsle

George D. Markham Professor of Government, Political Institutions and Economic Policy

• Kenneth Shepsle's web site

Kenneth A. Shepsle is the George D. Markham Professor of Government and a founding member of the Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences, predecessor to The Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard. He is the author or editor of:

• Politics in Plural Societies: A Theory of Democratic Instability
• The Giant Jigsaw Puzzle: Democratic Committee Assignments in the Modern House
• Models of Multiparty Electoral Competition
• Making and Breaking Governments
• Analyzing Politics
• The Congressional Budget Process: Some Views From the Inside
• Political Equilibrium
• Perspectives on Positive Political Economy
• American Government: Power and Purpose (nine editions)
• Cabinet Ministers and Parliamentary Government

Professor Shepsle has written numerous articles on formal political theory, congressional and parliamentary politics, public policy, and political economy. He was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and Guggenheim Fellow. He was editor of Public Choice, sits on the Board of Editors of the Cambridge University Press Series on the Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions, and served as Vice President of the American Political Science Association. In 1990 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was chair of the Department of Government at Harvard, 1995-98.

His current research focuses on formal models of political institutions and a special focus on intergenerational politics.