Professor, Vice Chair of the Department for Personnel Groups: American Politics, Methodology & Formal Theory, Models & Politics, Public Policy & Organization
University of California, Berkeley
gailmard@berkeley.edu
Professor Gailmard studies how principal-agent problems in politics affect the structure and development of political institutions. From this perspective, his research attempts to understand the strategic foundations of American political institutions; English imperial governance in the American colonies; expertise and political responsiveness in the bureaucracy; historical development of the American executive branch; congressional control of bureaucratic discretion; the internal organization of the U.S. Congress; and electoral accountability. He has also studied models of collective decision making in laboratory experiments.
Professor Gailmard is the author of Learning While Governing: Expertise and Accountability in the Executive Branch (2012, University of Chicago Press, with John W. Patty), which won the 2013 William H. Riker Prize (best book in political economy) and 2017 Herbert A. Simon Prize (most signfiicant contribution to public administration 5 or more years old), as well as Statistical Modeling and Inference for Social Science (2014, Cambridge University Press), a Ph.D.-level textbook. He has published research in leading social science journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics.