Torun Dewan
Professor of Political Science · Department of Government, London School of Economics
I am a political scientist at the London School of Economics. I model how people act together – parties and their factions, governments and the coalitions that make them, cabinets and their ministers, leaders and the led. One idea runs through the work: what holds a collective together is, past a point, what breaks it. I study where that point lies: coalition termination, party splits, ministerial resignations, and candidate exits. I have an interest in British political history and the development of its core institutions and voting behaviour.
A recent strand of my work reads classical rabbinic law as formal political economy. The Talmud, beneath its legal surface, argues about institutions – how to seat a court, how to divide a contested asset, how to render judgment when the bench itself may be captured – and its procedures often encode the very trade-offs a modern theorist would isolate. I take these sugyot as design mechanisms (in the spirit of Aumann & Maschler, 1985) and ask what, in the strategic setting each presupposes, the design achieves.
I teach courses on Social Choice, Public Choice and Game Theory (undergraduate and postgraduate), a graduate seminar on Leadership, and one on Institutions (Parties and Coalitions, Elections and Government).
As well as studying and teaching institutions, I help build them in my own field. I founded the Political Science and Political Economy (PSPE) research group at LSE in 2010, with Simon Hix, and the LSE/NYU annual conference, held since 2012, with Dimitri Landa. I am also a co-founder of the PolEconUK network. I currently run the PSPE research seminar, with Tim Besley, Tak-Huen Chau and Noam Yuchtman. In 2015 I hosted the inaugural Comparative Politics and Formal Theory conference at LSE. I am co-editor, with John Patty, of the Journal of Theoretical Politics.
My private passions are first and foremost Chelsea Football Club, where I have long stood on its famous “Shed End”, and now proudly stand alongside my two children; combat sports (mainly BJJ, Brown Belt since 2025 under Manxhina at London Fight Factory); and music (second generation punk, now classical). I enjoy food and wine and am currently writing a book (with Abhinay Muthoo), Breaking Bread: The Politics of Food, that connects models of leadership, bargaining, and conflict to chefs, restaurants and markets.
- Position
- Professor of Political Science, LSE (since 2011) · Visiting Professor, Tel Aviv University
- Education
- D.Phil, Nuffield College, Oxford 2002 · M.Sc, LSE 1997 · B.Sc (Econ) 1996
Research
Leadership
- Leadership with Trustworthy Associates
- The Rhetorical Strategies of Leaders: Standing Back, Stepping Down, and Speaking Clearly
- The Qualities of Leadership: Direction, Communication and Obfuscation
- Leading the Party: Coordination, Direction and Communication
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Overcoordination: Leadership, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Clarity coming soon
When a leader's clarity coordinates a movement so well it overshoots a catastrophe, the instruments of agreement – clarity, authority, cohesion – change sign.
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When Unity is Dangerous: Fragmentation, Federalism, and the Architecture of Restraint coming soon
When coordinated action can carry a collective over a catastrophic threshold, the institutions that manufacture agreement – unified leadership, cohesive parties, centralised authority – turn into hazards, and restraint takes the form of deliberate fragmentation: factions, federations, separated powers, staggered authority.
Parties, Coalitions, Cabinets
- In Defence of Factions
- Information Aggregation and Optimal Structure of the Executive
- Dynamic Government Performance
- The 3 A's of Government Formation: Appointment, Allocation, and Assignment
- Strategic Opposition and Government Cohesion in Westminster Democracies
- Individual and Collective Ministerial Performance and the Tenure of Ministers in the UK 1945–1997
- The Length of Ministerial Tenure in the UK 1945–1997
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A party of two factions sustains a common manifesto only by tolerating occasional splits – the political analogue of Green–Porter price wars, on the equilibrium path and on factions that have not defected.
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Coalitions as repeated disciplinary structures rather than one-shot divisions of spoils: who can govern together depends on whom they can monitor.
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Career concerns set inside a cabinet: judging ministers against one another nets out the fortune they share, so a scarce promotion becomes a contest won at the margin – and the leader's instrument is no longer a wage but the composition of the bench she gathers for comparison.
Teams, Contests, Turnover
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Playing for the Winning Team: Stepping Stones in Dynamic Talent Recruitment and Motivation under review
Talent is drawn to a winning team, making recruitment self-reinforcing; a team's survival turns on stepping-stone types – some never observed to act – that carry it between prospering and dissolving.
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The Luck of the Draw: New Evidence on Windfalls from Thousands of Randomized Income Shocks under review
The random draw of the FA Cup as a natural experiment in thousands of income shocks: a small club drawn away to a much larger one is handed a financial windfall and climbs the league pyramid over the following decade – an effect present even among clubs that lose the tie, and, for upward movement but not protection from relegation, conditional on the organisational capacity to spend it well.
- The Declining Talent Pool of Government
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Competing for Talent: Loyalty, Relative Status, and the Survival of Rivals in progress
The two-team sequel to Playing for the Winning Team: when organisations compete for the same talent, loyalty is what lets a trailing rival survive rather than collapse into a single dominant winner, and noise can sustain, even revive, the contest.
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Too Much Winning in progress
A two-sided variation on Playing for the Winning Team: winning outright ends the contest that motivated the effort, so the upper barrier becomes a cliff rather than a crown – the same force that builds a winning team is the one that can carry it over the edge.
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The time-series companion to The Cabinet as Yardstick: a leader's scarce talent is worth one thing fielded and another withheld, so the best are husbanded while a government is strong and deployed as it weakens – a succession schedule, with some never fielded at all.
The Political Economy of the Talmud
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When the Buy–Sell Clause Fails: Co-ownership Dissolution, from gud o agud to the Custody of Wards in progress
The buy–sell ('Texas shootout') clause and its Talmudic ancestor gud o agud (Bava Batra 13a): no priced clause can dissolve efficiently, protect each owner, and allocate to the higher-valuer at once – and where the contested object has a welfare of its own, a child, a holy site, the half-slave, the clause gives way to a court.
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A decision-maker can be better served by bias than by neutrality: the Talmud's zabla panel (Sanhedrin 3:1) as the verifiable-disclosure micro-foundation of the party-appointed arbitrator – each side's judge certifies what it can prove, and between two opposed custodians the state is revealed.
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The rule that a unanimous conviction acquits (Sanhedrin 17a) as the optimal response to a capturable court: because capture manufactures consensus, unanimity is its signature, and a court that refuses to convict on it deters the manipulation it cannot see.
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The Mishnah's cap on ransoming captives (Gittin 45a) as a community binding itself against its own mercy: a cap, not a ban, denies the captor his rent, and the dispute over whether a man may redeem himself for whatever he wishes identifies which externality – the common purse or the next abduction – the rule was built to correct.
Historical Political Economy
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A test of Hirschman's exit–voice–loyalty logic on 134,000 individual votes across 28 English constituencies, 1832–1868: the exit of a favoured candidate drives party switching, an effect that fades as durable partisan loyalty consolidates.
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Linking individual voting records to social class and mobility in nineteenth-century England, the paper asks how a voter's class origin, and movement between classes, shaped partisan choice as the franchise widened and industry remade the electorate.
- Victorian Voting: Party Orientation and Class Alignment Revisited
- Franchise Extension and the British Aristocracy
- The Political Effects of Franchise Extension: Evidence From the Second Reform Act
All publications
Articles
- A Political Economy of Social Discrimination
- Victorian Voting: Party Orientation and Class Alignment Revisited
- Electoral Competition, Control and Learning
- Leadership with Trustworthy Associates
- In Defence of Factions
- Information Aggregation and Optimal Structure of the Executive
- Elements of Political Persuasion: Content, Contact, Cue
- Franchise Extension and the British Aristocracy
- Dynamic Government Performance
- The Rhetorical Strategies of Leaders: Standing Back, Stepping Down, and Speaking Clearly
- The 3 A's of Government Formation: Appointment, Allocation, and Assignment
- Strategic Opposition and Government Cohesion in Westminster Democracies
- The Political Effects of Franchise Extension: Evidence From the Second Reform Act
- Economic Models of Electoral Politics
- The Declining Talent Pool of Government
- Individual and Collective Ministerial Performance and the Tenure of Ministers in the UK 1945–1997
- The Qualities of Leadership: Direction, Communication and Obfuscation
- Recent Economic Perspectives on Political Economy, Part I
- Recent Economic Perspectives on Political Economy, Part II
- Leading the Party: Coordination, Direction and Communication
- The Length of Ministerial Tenure in the UK 1945–1997
- Scandal, Protection and Recovery in the Cabinet
- Why States Don't Defect: Refugee Protection and Implicit Burden Sharing
- The Corrective Effect of Ministerial Resignations on Government Popularity
Books
- Accounting for Ministers: Scandal and Survival in British Government 1945–2007
- Rational Choice Politics, Volumes I–IV
Book chapters
- Rational Choice Classics in Political Science
- Choosing, Moving and Resigning at Westminster
Contact
Department of Government, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE.
Email: t.dewan@lse.ac.uk