Drawn by ‘intellectual synergy,’ Peter Buisseret joins Yale Jackson faculty

Peter Buisseret joined the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs in summer 2026 as an associate professor of political science and global affairs. An expert on formal theory and political economy, he focuses on how political institutions shape individual and collective decisions across a range of electoral and legislative contexts.

Buisseret previously held roles at Harvard University and the University of Chicago; he also served as a Starr Foundation National Fellow with the Hoover Institution in 2023-2024.

“Intellectually, Yale is far beyond any other institution — and that’s across many fields,” said Buisseret.

In a recent interview, Buisseret shared his reason for joining Yale, his courseload, and his political research. This interview has been edited for accuracy and clarity.

What influenced your decision to come to Yale?

The strength in global affairs — not just at Jackson but across different departments. You see it in economics and in political science, my area of study. There’s an intellectual synergy that’s just so strong and is, honestly, unparalleled.

I think as an academic, you also reach this mid-career stage where you ask, “Is what I’m doing relevant? Does it matter for something? Can the things that I'm doing be useful for a debate or a reform discussion that people actually care about?” As an example, I'm doing work on ranked-choice voting and on the role of small donors in elections and polarization. I see Jackson as an environment where I’ll be challenged to create real-world applications for my work and, in turn, Jackson can provide the resources for me to push the work I'm doing into the public domain and contribute to critical conversations.

Had you spent time at Yale before?

I gave a seminar at Yale a few years ago on ranked-choice voting. I received excellent feedback from my former advisor at Princeton, Adam Meirowitz, and Gerard Padró i Miquel; it set my paper back by about a year because we had a lot of work to do, but it ended up making the paper much better.

And already, before officially joining the faculty, I was welcomed to help organize a conference last June with the Cowles Foundation on political economy with Navin Kartik. Even before walking through the door, being involved with organizing conferences and working with people across fields, has been extremely exhilarating.

How do you define political economy?

There are lots of different ways of thinking about it but really, it’s about studying topics that are considered the proper domain of both economics and traditional political science. Consider the distribution of wealth: you can't detach the question of how an economic surplus gets created from the political question of how it gets divided.

There’s also a methodological conception, which is using the tools that we traditionally associate with economics — whether it's microeconomic theory or other empirical tools — to study questions that are traditionally thought of as political science-based questions. Why candidates choose polarized strategies may sound like something that you would study as a political scientist, but there are actually many economic tools that can be used and adapted to study very similar questions in an analytical sense.

Part of the joy of studying political economy is that there are these connections between fields, even at the methodological level, that can allow you to extract a lot of insights that otherwise you wouldn't be able to.

You have conducted research on ranked-choice voting, which is seen by many as an effective strategy for creating more representative outcomes in elections. Explain how your most recent paper finds that may not be the case.

One of the arguments that people have made in favor of ranked-choice voting is that it will encourage candidates to try to appeal beyond their narrow bases, with the reason being that voters don’t vote for a single candidate, but instead rank candidates. So, if I'm a candidate and I'm trying to win in a traditional election, I can only benefit from the support of the voters who like me the most, which is likely to be a traditional ideological or ethnic base. Under ranked-choice voting, though, I can benefit from the support of a voter who doesn't like me the most, because maybe their preferred candidate is going to get eliminated and their voters will flow my way.

Why candidates choose polarized strategies may sound like something that you would study as a political scientist, but there are actually many economic tools that can be used and adapted to study very similar questions in an analytical sense."

There’s an assumption that candidates will be encouraged to try and reach out beyond their traditional base to appeal to these kinds of voters and compete for those second preferences — our goal was to find out if this was true. The argument we made was that the possibility of winning second preferences doesn't always mean a candidate will compete more aggressively for them. If those second preferences are likely to flow their way anyway — because they're ideologically closer to the eliminated candidate than their rival is — a candidate doesn't need to compete for them. Instead, they can double down on their base to eke out a narrow advantage over their nearest neighbor, knowing they'll scoop up the second preferences regardless.

I don’t think it debunks ranked-choice voting, and we were not trying to do that. I think it provides a bit more subtlety to the debate — there is promise in some contexts but not so much in others.

With electoral reform, do you think there are other strategies that could be more beneficial?

I've come to a slightly ambivalent perspective on what we can predict as a consequence of any change in electoral reform. For example, the reform of the moment is proportional representation — many of its supporters having moved on from ranked-choice voting.

The challenge for any kind of analysis is that when you change an electoral rule, there are all of these other consequences that flow from that rule change. There may be changes in the number of parties or candidates that can effectively compete, and that's going to change legislative politics long after the election concludes, like the cohesion of parties in legislatures and the ability to exert discipline. We just don't have enough of a sense of what the big picture is to be able to confidently say that one change is going to have a beneficial effect.

Another problem in the U.S. today is that every electoral reform is conceived of, by either the proponents or opponents, as reflecting a zero-sum between the Democratic and Republican cause. I think there are common sense, reasonable measures that could be taken but, right now, any concession that one side makes is viewed as a betrayal. I'm not sure that anyone has the bravery or the good sense to take a more pragmatic path.

How will these topics be reflected in your teaching at Yale?

In the spring semester, I’ll be teaching a graduate course in theoretic models of political behavior. For undergraduates, I'm going to teach a cross-listed course between Jackson and the Political Science department on elections.

The undergraduate course will focus on three themes. One is thinking about the normative limits of elections: How well can elections perform in a society where people have different views about what the right option is? Then, there will be a section on explanations for polarization — why parties appear to be further apart than ever. What are the incentives the different kinds of electoral systems create for candidates to pursue what you might think of as broader versus more narrow or polarizing strategies? And then the third — and most exciting to me — is going to be built around analyzing contemporary proposals to reform electoral systems.

The idea is to use the models and the theories that we build in the first and second part of the course to directly tackle political reforms. Students can then see how you develop a structured argument that's theoretically informed and transparent, and use those more abstract models to actually try and say something insightful and concrete about a real-world reform.