Daniel S. Treisman

Daniel Treisman is Professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Treisman’s work focuses on Russian politics and economics and comparative political economy. He is the co-author of Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century; editor of The New Autocracy: Information, Politics, and Policy in Putin’s Russia; and author of The Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev, among other works.

A former interim lead editor of The American Political Science Review, he has also served as a consultant for the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and as acting director of UCLA’s Center for European and Eurasian Studies. In Russia, he is a member of the International Advisory Committee of the Higher School of Economics and a member of the Jury of the National Prize in Applied Economics. Since 2014, he has been the director of the Russia Political Insight Project, an international collaboration funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, to investigate political decisionmaking in Putin’s Russia.

Treisman has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Institute for Human Sciences and has received fellowships from the German Marshall Fund of the US and the Smith Richardson Foundation. He was educated at Oxford University (BA) and Harvard University (Ph.D.).