About Konstantin Sonin

Konstantin Sonin is John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. His research interests include political economics, development, and economic theory. His papers have been published in leading academic journals in economics and political science.

Sonin earned MSc and PhD in mathematics from Moscow State University and MA in economics at Moscow’s New Economic School (NES), was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a visiting professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, and served on the faculty of NES and HSE University in Moscow.

In addition to his academic work, Sonin has been writing columns and Op-Eds and a blog on Russian political and economic issues. 

Selected Publications

The Political Economics of Non-democracy (with Georgy Egorov), Journal of Economic Literature, forthcoming.

How Does Kompromat Affect Politics? A Model of Transparency Regimes (with Monika Nalepa), Quarterly Journal of Political Science, forthcoming.

Rebel Capacity, Intelligence Gathering, and Combat Tactics (with Austin L. Wright), American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming.

Elections in Non-Democracies (with Georgy Egorov), Economic Journal, 131 (636), 1682–1716, May 2021.

Social Mobility and Stability of Democracy: Re-evaluating de Tocqueville (with Daron Acemoglu and Georgy Egorov), Quarterly Journal of Economics, 133: 2, 1041–1105, May 2018.

Political Economy of Redistribution (with Daniel Diermeier and Georgy Egorov), Econometrica, 85(3), 851–870, May 2017.

Formal Models of Nondemocratic Politics (with Scott Gehlbach and Milan Svolik), Annual Review of Political Science, 19, 565-584, June 2016.

Field Experiment Estimate of Electoral Fraud in Russian Parliamentary Elections (with Ruben Enikolopov, Vassily Korovkin, Maria Petrova, and Alexei Zakharov), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110 (2), 448-452, January 2013.

Dictators and Their Viziers: Endogenizing the Loyalty-Competence Trade-off (with Georgy Egorov), Journal of European Economic Association, 9 (5), 903–930, October 2011.

Why Resource-Poor Dictators Allow Freer Media: A Theory and Evidence from Panel Data (with Georgy Egorov and Sergei Guriev), American Political Science Review, 103 (4), 645-668, November 2009.

Coalition Formation in Non-Democracies (with Daron Acemoglu and Georgy Egorov), Review of Economic Studies, 75(4), 987-1009, December 2008.

Why the Rich May Favor Poor Protection of Property Rights, Journal of Comparative Economics, 31 (4), 715-731, October 2003.