Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
political scientist
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (; born November 24, 1946) is a political scientist, professor at New York University, and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Biography
Bueno de Mesquita graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1963, (along with Richard Axel and Alexander Rosenberg), earned his BA degree from Queens College, New York in 1967, and then his MA and PhD from the University of Michigan. He specializes in international relations, foreign policy, and nation building. He is one of the originators of selectorate theory, and was also the director of New York University's Alexander Hamilton Center for Political Economy from 2006 to 2016.
He was a founding partner at Mesquita & Roundell, until that company merged with his other company, Selectors, LLC, that used the selectorate model for macro-level policy analysis. Now, the company is called Selectors, LLC and uses both the forecasting model and the selectorate approach in consulting.
Bueno de Mesquita is discussed in an August 16, 2009 Sunday New York Times Magazine article entitled "Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb?" In December 2008 he was also the subject of a History Channel two-hour special entitled "The Next Nostradamus" and has been featured on the 2021 Netflix series How to Become a Tyrant.
He is the author of many books, including The Dictator's Handbook, co-authored with Alastair Smith, and the book The Invention of Power (January 2022).
Work in forecasting
Into the early 2000s, Bueno de Mesquita was known for his development of an expected utility model (EUM), an operationalized application of the expected utility hypothesis from mathematical economics. The model has been successful in predicting the outcome of many political events over a unidimensional policy space.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2926412. VIAF identifies the subject as 91278972. The Library of Congress control number is n80131624. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946, 1963, 1967 and 2006.
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