Edward L. Gibson Website

Edward Gibson is Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Science. He was Associate Chair of the department from 2008 to 2010, and has also served as Director of Graduate Studies.   He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1992. His research and teaching is on Comparative Politics, party politics, problems of democratization, federalism, and Latin American politics.  Gibson is also a voting member of Northwestern’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

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, Comparative Politics, and articles in edited volumes. Translations of his articles have also been published in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Russia.  

Gibson’s current publications include a forthcoming book entitled Boundary Control: Making and Unmaking Subnational Authoritarianism in Democratic Countries, Cambridge University Press (2011). The book explores how regional authoritarian enclaves in states or provinces prosper in countries where the national government is democratic.  It also explores how such political systems fall apart.  The book compare experiences in the United States, Argentina, and Mexico.  In 2010 and 2011 Gibson is also publishing, “Federalized Party Systems: Theory and an Empirical Application to Argentina,” (co-authored with Julieta Suarez Cao) Comparative Politics, October 2010, as well as a number of articles on subnational authoritarianism and federalism in journals and edited volumes.

Gibson was the first political scientist to be awarded a Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) by the National Science Foundation. 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.

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 received teaching awards from the Northwestern College of Arts and Sciences, the Northwestern Political Science Department, and the Student Governments of Northwstern and the University of Michigan.

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.