Barry R. Weingast
Senior Fellow

Expertise: Political economy and public policy, political foundation of markets and economic reform, U.S. politics, regulation

Barry R. Weingast is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution as well as the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University; he served as chair of that department from 1996 to 2001. He is also a professor of economics, by courtesy, at the university. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 1993 to 1994.

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 is the 2006 recipient of the William H. Riker Prize in Political Science. 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 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); with Ira Katznelson, Of Preferences and Situations: Points of Intersection between Historical and Rational Choice Institutionalism (Russell Sage Press, 2005); and with Donald Wittman, Handbook of Political Economy (forthcoming, 2006).

Recent publications include The Institutional Sources of State Power in International Competition (with Kenneth A. Schultz); International Organization (2003); "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; "The Positive Political Theory of Legislative History: New Perspectives on the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its Interpretation (with Daniel Rodriguez), University of Pennsylvania Law Review (2003); "The Constitutional Dilemma of Economic Liberty" Journal of Economic Perspectives (2005); and "The New Separation of Powers Approach to American Politics" (with Rui J. P. de Figueiredo, Jr., Tonja Jacobi) in Barry R. Weingast and Donald Wittman, eds., Handbook of Political Economy (2006, forthcoming). 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 Ph.D. in economics from the California Institute of Technology in 1978.