Peter Ordeshook

Peter C. Ordeshook is an American political scientist. He is the Mary Stillman Harkness Professor of Political Science at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Rochester and a Bachelor of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied engineering, economics and politics. He has been a professor at Caltech since 1987. He has authored influential papers and books, such as "The Calculus of Voting" (co-authored with William H. Riker). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Research interests

His research interests include the election process, international relations, and applications of game theory to politics.

Research statement

• To study voting generally in Central Europe and the states of the former USSR, with specific interest in developing methodologies for the detection and measurement of electoral fraud.

• To refine a new methodology for aggregate data analysis. In collaboration with M. Myagkov and mathematicians at the Institute for Open Economy in Moscow, he has developed an extension of the Chambers-Steel model, which is currently being tested with artificial data.

• Completion of his manuscript with M. Klochko using agent-based modeling that focuses on endogenous time preferences and endogenous social networks. Upon completion of this manuscript the various models will be applied to other parameters of individual choice and to alternative specifications of network transition structures.

Selected publications

• Lessons for Citizens of a New Democracy. Edward Elgar, 1997.
• A Political Theory Primer. Routlege Press, 1992.
• Constitutional Secessions Clauses (with Yan Chen), Constitutional Political Economy. 1994.
• The Forensics of Election Fraud: Russia and Ukraine (with Mikhail Myagkov), Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Endogenous Time Preferences in Social Networks (with Marianna Klochko), Edward Elgar, 2005.
• Designing Federalism (with M. Filippov and O. Shvetsova), Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Game Theory and Political Theory, Cambridge University Press, 1986.
• The Balance of Power: Stability in International Systems (with Emerson Niou and Gregory Rose), Cambridge University Press, 1989.

External links

• Ordeshook's profile