Barry Weingast

Barry R. Weingast is Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He served as chair of the political science department from 1996 to 2001. He is also a professor of economics, by courtesy, at stanford.

Weingast is an expert in political economy and public policy, the political foundation of markets and economic reform, U.S. politics, and regulation. His current research focuses on the political determinants of public policymaking and the political foundations of markets and democracy.

Weingast is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the Heinz Eulau Award for Best Paper from the American Political Science Review in 1987. With Charles Stewart, he received the Award for Best Paper in Political History by the American Political Science Association in 1994 and again in 1998.

He is also the recipient, along with Kenneth Schultz, of the Franklin L. Burdette Award for Best Paper Presented at the 1994 Political Science Association Meeting. Weingast was also a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 1993–1994.

Weingast authored (with Robert Bates, Avner Grief, Margaret Levi, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal) Analytic Narratives, published in 1998. Weingast is editor, with Kenneth A. Shepsle, of Positive Theories of Congressional Institutions (University of Michigan Press, 1995).

Recent publications include The Institutional Sources of State Power in International Competition (with Kenneth A. Schultz), Hoover Essays in Public Policy (1996); "The Political Foundations of Democracy and the Rule of Law," American Political Science Review (1997); "The Economic Role of Political Institutions," Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization (1995); "Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in 17th Century England" (with Douglas North), Journal of Economic History; "Order, Disorder, and Economic Change: Latin America vs. North America" (with Douglas C. North and William Summerhill, 2000); and "Pathologies of Federalism, Russian Style: Political Institutions and Economic Transition" (with Rui de Rigueiredo). Most recently, he has written on democracy and its failure in twentieth-century Spain, nineteenth-century United States, seventeenth-century England, and modern Chile.

Weingast earned a PhD in economics from the California Institute of Technology in 1978.