John D. Huber

Professor of Political Science. Research focuses on how democratic institutions translate citizens' preferences into public policy, with particular attention to the sources of bureaucratic discretion and to factors that encourage (or discourage) progressive redistribution of income. Early research examined how the rules governing the formation and dismissal of governments, and legislating, in parliamentary systems affected the discretion afforded to policymakers. More recent work focuses on the effects of state religion and of ethnic divisions in societies on policies that affect social welfare. In a key contribution to the debate over whether ethnic heterogeneity undermines public goods provision, He and a co-author demonstrate that heterogeneity, per se, has no measurable effect, nor (remarkably) do patterns of demographic segregation by ethnicity, but that the negative effect of heterogeneity detected in previous studies is conditional on the presence of prior levels of economic inequality across ethnic groups. Huber's list of seminal contributions to understanding of modern democratic institutions is far too long to rehearse comprehensively here, and the quality of the publications is equally impressive.