Torun Dewan
Professor of Political Science · Department of Government, London School of Economics
I am a political scientist at the London School of Economics. I model how people act together – parties and their factions, governments and the coalitions that make them, cabinets and their ministers, leaders and the led. One idea runs through the work: what holds a collective together is, past a point, what breaks it. I study where that point lies: coalition termination, party splits, ministerial resignations, and candidate exits. I have an interest in British political history and the development of its core institutions and voting behaviour.
A recent strand of my work reads classical rabbinic law as formal political economy. The Talmud, beneath its legal surface, argues about institutions – how to seat a court, how to divide a contested asset, how to render judgment when the bench itself may be captured – and its procedures often encode the very trade-offs a modern theorist would isolate. I take these sugyot as design mechanisms (in the spirit of Aumann & Maschler, 1985) and ask what, in the strategic setting each presupposes, the design achieves.
I teach courses on Social Choice, Public Choice and Game Theory (undergraduate and postgraduate), a graduate seminar on Leadership, and one on Institutions (Parties and Coalitions, Elections and Government).
As well as studying and teaching institutions, I help build them in my own field. I founded the Political Science and Political Economy (PSPE) research group at LSE in 2010, with Simon Hix, and the LSE/NYU annual conference, held since 2012, with Dimitri Landa. I am also a co-founder of the PolEconUK network. I currently run the Political Economy seminar with Tim Besley, Tak-Huen Chau and Noam Yuchtman. In 2015 I hosted the inaugural Comparative Politics and Formal Theory conference at LSE. I am co-editor, with John Patty, of the Journal of Theoretical Politics.
My private passions are first and foremost Chelsea Football Club, where I have long stood on its famous “Shed End”, and now proudly stand alongside my two children; combat sports (mainly BJJ, Brown Belt since 2025 under Manxhina at London Fight Factory); and music (second generation punk, now classical). I enjoy food and wine and am currently writing a book (with Abhinay Muthoo), Breaking Bread: The Politics of Food, that connects models of leadership, bargaining, and conflict to chefs, restaurants and markets. Much of its case material, and especially the chapters on leadership, grew out of long conversations with the Israeli chef Uri Jeremias, known as Uri Buri. His restaurant in Akko is, to my mind, a study in leadership: in the team he builds and holds together in the kitchen, and in the place that team has made in the wider community. It is a working model of coexistence in a mixed city.
- Position
- Professor of Political Science, LSE (since 2011) · Visiting Professor, Tel Aviv University
- Education
- D.Phil, Nuffield College, Oxford 2002 · M.Sc, LSE 1997 · B.Sc (Econ) 1996
Papers in Press or Under Review
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Because capture manufactures consensus, unanimity becomes its signature, so the optimal defence refuses to convict on it – the Sanhedrin's rule that a unanimous conviction acquits (Sanhedrin 17a). The account sorts the institutions of collective judgment by the capture each of them fears.
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Reading the Economic Logic of Law from Its Recorded Disputes: The Machloket as Identification in progress
A machloket over an agreed rule works as an identifying restriction: rival opinions are rival economic mechanisms, and the rulings on which they differ tell them apart – shown for the liability of a renter and for fire, each beside its common-law cousin.
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Two Talmudic doctrines – the goring ox and migo – in which a court reads a hidden fact from the conduct its own rule shapes, and a recorded dispute over the rule's reason identifies the model.
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When the Buy–Sell Clause Fails: Co-ownership Dissolution, from gud o agud to the Custody of Wards in progress
The buy–sell ('Texas shootout') clause and its Talmudic ancestor gud o agud (Bava Batra 13a): no priced dissolution is at once efficient, protective of each owner, and allocative to the higher-valuer – and objects with a welfare of their own pass to a court instead.
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A Political Economy of Social Discrimination
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Playing for the Winning Team: Stepping Stones in Dynamic Talent Recruitment and Motivation under review
Talent is drawn to a winning team, making recruitment self-reinforcing; a team's survival turns on stepping-stone types – some never observed to act – that carry it between prospering and dissolving.
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The Luck of the Draw: New Evidence on Windfalls from Thousands of Randomized Income Shocks under review
The FA Cup's random draw as a natural experiment in income shocks: a small club drawn against a giant gets a windfall and climbs the league pyramid over the following decade, even in defeat.
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A test of Hirschman's exit–voice–loyalty logic on 134,000 individual votes across 28 English constituencies, 1832–1868: the exit of a favoured candidate drives party switching, an effect that fades as durable partisan loyalty consolidates.
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Linking individual voting records to social class and mobility in nineteenth-century England, the paper asks how a voter's class origin, and movement between classes, shaped partisan choice as the franchise widened and industry remade the electorate.
Research
Leadership
- Leadership with Trustworthy Associates
- The Rhetorical Strategies of Leaders: Standing Back, Stepping Down, and Speaking Clearly
- The Qualities of Leadership: Direction, Communication and Obfuscation
- Leading the Party: Coordination, Direction and Communication
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Overcoordination: Leadership, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Clarity coming soon
When a leader's clarity coordinates a movement so well it overshoots a catastrophe, the instruments of agreement – clarity, authority, cohesion – change sign, and the very skills that build a movement become the ones that endanger it.
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When Unity is Dangerous: Fragmentation, Federalism, and the Architecture of Restraint coming soon
When coordinated action can carry a collective over a catastrophic threshold, the institutions that manufacture agreement become hazards, and restraint takes the form of deliberate fragmentation: factions, federalism, separated powers.
Parties, Coalitions, Cabinets
- In Defence of Factions
- Information Aggregation and Optimal Structure of the Executive
- Dynamic Government Performance
- The 3 A's of Government Formation: Appointment, Allocation, and Assignment
- Strategic Opposition and Government Cohesion in Westminster Democracies
- Individual and Collective Ministerial Performance and the Tenure of Ministers in the UK 1945–1997
- The Length of Ministerial Tenure in the UK 1945–1997
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A party of two factions sustains a common manifesto only by tolerating occasional splits – the political analogue of Green–Porter price wars, on the equilibrium path and on factions that have not defected.
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Coalitions as repeated disciplinary structures rather than one-shot divisions of spoils: who can govern together depends on whom they can monitor, so the feasible partnerships are set by the reach of monitoring, not by ideological proximity alone.
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Career concerns inside a cabinet: judging ministers against one another nets out their shared fortune, turning a scarce promotion into a contest won at the margin, with the bench's composition as the leader's instrument.
Teams, Contests, Turnover
- The Declining Talent Pool of Government
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Competing for Talent: Loyalty, Relative Status, and the Survival of Rivals in progress
The two-team sequel to Playing for the Winning Team: when organisations compete for the same talent, loyalty lets a trailing rival survive rather than collapse, and noise can even revive the contest.
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Too Much Winning in progress
A two-sided variation on Playing for the Winning Team: winning outright ends the contest that drove the effort, so the upper barrier is a cliff, not a crown – the same force that builds a winning team can carry it over the edge.
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The time-series companion to The Cabinet as Yardstick: the best talent is husbanded while a government is strong and deployed as it weakens – a succession schedule, with some never fielded at all.
The Political Economy of the Talmud
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A decision-maker can be better served by bias than neutrality: the Talmud's zabla panel (Sanhedrin 3:1) as a micro-foundation of the party-appointed arbitrator, where two opposed judges each certify what they can prove.
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The Mishnah's cap on ransoming captives (Gittin 45a) as a community binding itself against its own mercy: a cap, not a ban, denies the captor his rent, and a recorded dispute identifies which externality the rule corrects.
Historical Political Economy
- Victorian Voting: Party Orientation and Class Alignment Revisited
- Franchise Extension and the British Aristocracy
- The Political Effects of Franchise Extension: Evidence From the Second Reform Act
All publications
Articles
- A Political Economy of Social Discrimination
- Victorian Voting: Party Orientation and Class Alignment Revisited
- Electoral Competition, Control and Learning
- Leadership with Trustworthy Associates
- In Defence of Factions
- Information Aggregation and Optimal Structure of the Executive
- Elements of Political Persuasion: Content, Contact, Cue
- Franchise Extension and the British Aristocracy
- Dynamic Government Performance
- The Rhetorical Strategies of Leaders: Standing Back, Stepping Down, and Speaking Clearly
- The 3 A's of Government Formation: Appointment, Allocation, and Assignment
- Strategic Opposition and Government Cohesion in Westminster Democracies
- The Political Effects of Franchise Extension: Evidence From the Second Reform Act
- Economic Models of Electoral Politics
- The Declining Talent Pool of Government
- Individual and Collective Ministerial Performance and the Tenure of Ministers in the UK 1945–1997
- The Qualities of Leadership: Direction, Communication and Obfuscation
- Recent Economic Perspectives on Political Economy, Part I
- Recent Economic Perspectives on Political Economy, Part II
- Leading the Party: Coordination, Direction and Communication
- The Length of Ministerial Tenure in the UK 1945–1997
- Scandal, Protection and Recovery in the Cabinet
- Why States Don't Defect: Refugee Protection and Implicit Burden Sharing
- The Corrective Effect of Ministerial Resignations on Government Popularity
Books
- Accounting for Ministers: Scandal and Survival in British Government 1945–2007
- Rational Choice Politics, Volumes I–IV
Book chapters
- Rational Choice Classics in Political Science
- Choosing, Moving and Resigning at Westminster
Contact
Department of Government, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE.
Email: [email protected]