John Gerring

This profile was current as of 2012, when he was part of the on-campus Kellogg community.

John Gerring (PhD, University of California, Berkeley), professor of political science at Boston University,* joins the Kellogg Institute for the 2011-12 academic year as the Hewlett Visiting Fellow for Public Policy. With wide-ranging interests in comparative politics and methodology, Gerring is a principal investigator, with Faculty Fellow Michael Coppedge, on the “Varieties of Democracy” project to construct a new set of democracy indicators. Their collaboration will be a central focus of Gerring’s time at the Institute.

In other projects, Gerring plans to continue research on the relationship between countries’ regime histories and various governance outcomes and to explore the relationship between democracy, population size, and heterogeneity. He will teach a spring course with Coppedge on theoretical approaches to comparative politics.

The most recent of Gerring’s many books include Social Science Methodology: A Unified Framework(Cambridge University Press, 2012) and with David Collier, Concepts and Method in Social Sciences: The Tradition of Giovanni Sartori (Routledge, 2009). With James Mahoney, he received a National Science Foundation grant to collect historical data related to colonialism and long-term development.

Gerring has served as a fellow of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and as a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Evaluation of USAID Programs to Support the Development of Democracy.

*As of 2016, Gerring is professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin.

Activities & Lectures

Varieties of Democracy conference
September 28–October 2, 2011
Gothenberg, Sweden

Workshop on methods of causal inference in small-N settings with special focus on democratization for Department of Defense agency
September 21–23
Washington, DC

Paper presentation (on the relationship between polity size and democracy)
September 15–16
Cornell University