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 Political Economy 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. Much of its case material, and especially the chapters on leadership, grew out of long conversations with the Israeli chef Uri Jeremias, known as Uri Buri. His restaurant in Akko is, to my mind, a study in leadership: in the team he builds and holds together in the kitchen, and in the place that team has made in the wider community. It is a working model of coexistence in a mixed city.
- 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
Featured
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The time-series companion to The Cabinet as Yardstick: a scarce reserve does not deter but is a closer, deployed late for the run-in as the striving journeyman's effort fades below the talent gap.
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Because capture manufactures consensus, unanimity becomes its signature, so the optimal defence refuses to convict on it – the Sanhedrin's rule that a unanimous conviction acquits (Sanhedrin 17a). The account sorts the institutions of collective judgment by the capture each of them fears.
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Reading the Economic Logic of Law from Its Recorded Disputes: The Machloket as Identification in progress
A machloket over an agreed rule works as an identifying restriction: rival opinions are rival economic mechanisms, and the rulings on which they differ tell them apart – shown for the liability of a renter and for fire, each beside its common-law cousin.
Under Review
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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 FA Cup's random draw as a natural experiment in income shocks: a small club drawn against a giant gets a windfall and climbs the league pyramid over the following decade, even in defeat.
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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.
Working Papers
Parties, Coalitions, Cabinets
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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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Career concerns inside a cabinet: judging ministers against one another nets out their shared fortune, turning a scarce promotion into a contest won at the margin, with the bench's composition as the leader's instrument.
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 dissolution is at once efficient, protective of each owner, and allocative to the higher-valuer – and objects with a welfare of their own pass to a court instead.
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A decision-maker can be better served by bias than neutrality: the Talmud's zabla panel (Sanhedrin 3:1) as a micro-foundation of the party-appointed arbitrator, where two opposed judges each certify what they can prove.
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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 a recorded dispute identifies which externality the rule corrects.
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The Political Economy of Silence: Adverse Selection and the Law of the Moser coming soon
Why groups under a distrusted authority forbid informing on one of their own, and why the ban is both blanket and severe: adverse selection tilts the pool of informers toward malice, and no intermediate penalty separates the honest from the malicious, so the rule is driven to a corner.
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The Malicious Accuser: Adverse Selection in Accusation and the Institutions That Manage It coming soon
Any power that relies on private parties to name whom to punish faces a lemons problem, since malicious accusation is over-supplied; distant institutions reach for the same two instruments – a screen that taxes the charge its bringer cannot prove, and, where the charge is untestable, a deterrent no one is allowed to refute.
All publications
Articles
Books
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