Luis Medina (professor)

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Luis Fernando Medina (Ph.D Stanford) specializes in formal approaches to comparative politics. He has completed a book A Theory of Collective Action and Social Change (University of Michigan Press, 2007) that develops a method to study games with multiple equilibria (of which collective action problems are a special case) and applies it to the study of politico-economic problems, especially clientelism and wage bargaining. A preliminary presentation of the method was published in Rationality and Society (2006).

Currently he is engaged in a second project that extends the method of stability sets to the study of electoral games. For this project, he was recently awarded a Fellowship from the Bankard Fund in Political Economy.

He teaches courses on game theory, on Latin America and on the connections between rational choice theory and other traditions (especially social theory). He is also currently responsible for the Core Seminar in Comparative Politics.

He has also written on the game-theoretic analysis of elections, extending results of the theory of spatial competition to the case of multi-district elections. The results of this work were published as a piece in the British Journal of Political Science (2006).

A citizen of Colombia, where he received his B.A degrees in Economics and Philosophy, he maintains ties in his native country, especially as co-director of the Center for Research in Political Economy at the Universidad Externado de Colombia.