Mathew McCubbins

Mathew D. McCubbins served as Distinguished Professor and holder of the Chancellor’s Associates Chair in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego, from 1987 to 2011. He also held an appointment in the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at UCSD. Prior to UCSD, McCubbins taught at the University of Texas at Austin, Stanford University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of San Diego Law School. He earned a B.A. in political science from the University of California, Irvine, followed by an M.S. and Ph.D. in social science from the California Institute of Technology. Later in his career, he was Provost Professor of Business, Law, and Political Economy at the University of Southern California, where he directed the USC-Caltech Center for the Study of Law and Politics, and then joined Duke University as the Ruth F. De Varney Professor of Political Science and Professor of Law from 2013 until 2021.

McCubbins's research examined legislative organization, party government in legislatures, delegation of authority by congressional parties, political oversight including fire-alarm mechanisms, democratic processes, political communication, cognition in decision-making, and the intersections of law, business, and political economy. His influential publications include Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House (1993, with Gary W. Cox), which received the American Political Science Association’s Legislative Studies Section Richard F. Fenno Jr. Prize in 1994; The Logic of Delegation: Congressional Parties and the Appropriations Process (1991, with D. Roderick Kiewiet), winner of the APSA Gladys M. Kammerer Award in 1992; Setting the Agenda: Responsible Party Government in the US House of Representatives (2005, with Gary W. Cox), awarded the APSA Leon Epstein Award; The Democratic Dilemma: Can Citizens Learn What They Need to Know? (1998, with Arthur Lupia); and Stealing the Initiative (2000). McCubbins was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011. At UCSD, he received the Chancellor’s Associates Faculty Excellence Award for Graduate Teaching in 2008 and served as Faculty Research Lecturer in 2008-2009. His work advanced understanding of institutional design, political control, and bounded rationality in politics.