An economist and political scientist, Robinson has conducted influential research in the field of political and economic development and the relationships between political power and institutions and prosperity. His work explores the underlying causes of economic and political divergence both historically and today and uses both the mathematical and quantitative methods of economics along with the case study, qualitative and fieldwork methodologies used in other social sciences.

Robinson has a particular interest in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and is a Fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka. He taught a summer school at the University of the Andes in Bogotá between 1994 and 2022. He has conducted fieldwork and collected data in Bolivia, Colombia, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. He has published three books co-authored with Daron Acemoglu, an Institute Professor of Economics at MIT. The first, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, proposed a theory of the emergence of and stability of democracy and dictatorship. Their second book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (translated into 41 languages since its publication in 2012), pulled together much of their joint research on comparative development and proposed a theory of why some countries have flourished economically while others have fallen into poverty. Their most recent book, The Narrow Corridor: States, Society and the Fate of Liberty, examines the incessant and inevitable struggle between states and society, and gives an account of the deep historical processes that have shaped the modern world.

Monika Nalepa (PhD, Columbia University) is professor of political science at the University of Chicago. With a focus on post-communist Europe, her research interests include transitional justice, parties and legislatures, and game-theoretic approaches to comparative politics. Her first book, Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe was published in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics Series and received the Best Book award from the Comparative Democratization section of the APSA and the Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award from the Political Organizations and Parties section of the APSA. Her next book with Cambridge University Press, published in 2022, is entitled After Authoritarianism: Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability. She has also published articles in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Comparative Politics, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Parliamentary Affairs, and Constitutional Political Economy.

Monika Nalepa is the Director of the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab, which produces the Global Transitional Justice Dataset.

Gary Herrigel is interested in comparative political economy, organizations and alternative forms of governance throughout the developed and developing world. He is author of three books, most recently Globale Qualitätsproduktion. Transnationale Produktionssysteme in der Automobilzulieferindustrie und im Maschinenbau (Frankfurt aM: Campus Verlag, 2017—with Volker Wittke and Ulrich Voskamp). This book examines recursive learning processes, upgrading and governance in German manufacturing globalization. Currently, he is working on a variety of projects, all having to do with the relationship between transnational self-optimizing governance architectures, learning and sustainability in industry and agriculture. 

Scott Gehlbach is the Elise and Jack Lipsey Professor in the Department of Political Science, the Harris School of Public Policy, and the College at the University of Chicago. A scholar of authoritarian and post-authoritarian regimes, much of Gehlbach’s research is motivated by the contemporary and historical experience of Russia and Ukraine. His early work focused on the postcommunist transition in these and neighboring countries—a period of enormous political and economic change that exposed the centrality of institutions and the often divergent effects of similar reforms. More recently, Gehlbach has examined the relationship between reform and rebellion in autocracies, with an empirical focus on late Imperial Russia, and the impact of political connections on economic outcomes using large firm-level datasets from Ukraine. An early and leading practitioner of the use of game theory to model the institutions of authoritarian regimes, Gehlbach is author of the widely used textbook Formal Models of Domestic Politics, now in its second edition.

Prior to coming to Chicago, Gehlbach was for sixteen years a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has at various times been affiliated with both the New Economic School—twice as a Fulbright-Hays Fellow—and the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Among other service to the discipline, he is currently first vice president of the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics, associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and organizer of the annual Summer Workshop in the Economic History and Historical Political Economy of Eurasia. At the University of Chicago, Gehlbach co-led the process to create a new Ph.D. Program in Political Economy, a joint offering of the Department of Political Science and the Harris School of Public Policy; he now leads the program as its director.