Thad Dunning is Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University and a research fellow at Yale’s Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies as well as the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. He studies comparative politics, political economy, and methodology.
His first book, Crude Democracy: Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes (2008, Cambridge University Press), which contrasts the democratic and authoritarian effects of natural resource wealth, won the Best Book Award from the Comparative Democratization section of the American Political Science Association as well as the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize, for the best first book on an international topic by a member of the Yale faculty. The dissertation on which the book is based also won the Mancur Olson Prize from the Political Economy Section of the American Political Science Association, for the best dissertation in the field of political economy completed in the previous two years.
His current work on ethnic and other cleavages draws on field and natural experiments and qualitative fieldwork in Latin America, India, and Africa. His co-authored paper in the American Political Science Review draws on related work in Mali, an ethnically heterogeneous society in which the cross-cutting ties provided by a social institution called “cousinage” or “joking kinship” may limit the political salience of ethnicity.
Dunning has written on a range of methodological topics, including econometric corrections for selection effects, qualitative and multi-method research, and the use of natural experiments in the social sciences. His work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Political Analysis, Studies in Comparative International Development, and other journals. He received a Ph.D. degree in political science and an M.A. degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley (2006).