George Tsebelis

This profile was current as of 2016, when he was part of the on-campus Kellogg community.

George Tsebelis, a visiting fellow for the 2015–-16 academic year, is the Anatol Rapoport Collegiate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. With interests in comparative government and politics, political economy, and formal modeling, his work has used game theoretic models to analyze the effects of institutions in Western Europe and the European Union and, more recently, in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Greece.

His Kellogg project, “The Effects of Constitutions on Rights and Welfare,” takes advantage of Constitute, a massive dataset made available by the Comparative Constitutions Project, to consider a range of questions related to constitutional choices and their potential outcomes on institutions, growth and welfare, and individual and human rights in both democratic and nondemocratic countries.

Among his many publications are Nested Games: Rational Choice in Comparative Politics (University of California Press, 1991), Bicameralism (coauthored, Cambridge University Press, 1997), Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work (2002) and Reforming the European Union: Realizing the Impossible (coauthored, 2013), both from Princeton University Press.

Originally from Greece, Tsebelis holds an engineering doctorate in mathematical statistics from Pierre et Marie Curie Université (Paris VI) and an honorary doctorate from the University of Crete in addition to his PhD in political science.