Edward L. Gibson Website

Edward Gibson is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Chair of the Department of Political Science. He is also a Faculty Fellow at the Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern University. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1992. His research and teaching is on Comparative Politics, Democratization, Federalism, and Latin American Politics. Earlier work focused on the social and territorial bases of party development and partisan coalition-building in Latin America. His recent work on subnational authoritarianism in democratic countries focuses on how the spread of democratic institutions within nation-states is shaped by party politics and strategies of territorial control by political leaders, and is based on research on Argentina, Mexico, and the United States.

He is the author of Class and Conservative Parties: Argentina in Comparative Perspective (1996), and is editor of Federalism and Democracy in Latin America (2004). He has also published articles in World Politics, Studies in Comparative International Development, Latin American Politics and Society, and articles in edited volumes. Translations of his articles have also been published in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Russia.

Gibson was the first political scientist to be awarded a Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) by the National Science Foundation (in 1998). His work has also been supported by awards from the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, the Searle Foundation for Policy Research, the University of Michigan, and Northwestern University. He was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies from 1990 to 1992, and was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan from 1992 to 1994. His first article in World Politics received the runner-up award for the American Political Science Association's Luebbert award for best journal article in Comparative Politics in 1998.

At Northwestern University Gibson was awarded the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship in Teaching Excellence in 2003, the University's highest teaching award. Prior to that he was the recipient of the College of Arts and Sciences E. Leroy Hall Award for Excellence in Teaching as well as the Political Science Department's Barry Farrell Award for teaching excellence. He has served as Director of Graduate Studies in the Political Science Department.

Gibson is also co-founder of Northwestern's interdisciplinary Program in Comparative Historical Social Science (CHSS). This program is a joint venture between the departments of Political Science and Sociology, and is the only university program in the United States that offers an institutional venue for formal certificate-level training in Ph.D. programs and faculty collaboration in comparative historical research.