Robert J. Franzese, Jr.

Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
Research Associate Professor, Center for Political Studies

Professor Franzese's research interests center on the comparative and international politics and political economy of developed democracies and, especially as inspired by the empirical challenges that arise in those substantive and theoretical areas, on political methodology.

Substantively, his work has focused on how political and economic (a) institutions (e.g., electoral & governmental systems, central bank independence, labor-market organization, etc.), (b) structure (e.g., income distribution, party-system polarization and fractionalization), and (c) circumstances/events (e.g., elections, terms-of-trade shocks, etc.) affect macroeconomic policymaking: its character and its efficacy.

As of January 2008, he had authored, co-authored, or co-edited three books, including Macroeconomic Policies of Developed Democracies (Cambridge 2002) and Modeling and Interpreting Interactive Hypotheses in Regression Analysis (Michigan 2007), twenty-five articles and chapters--in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis, International Organization, and European Union Politics and in volumes published by, for example, Kluwer, Routledge, and Oxford University Presses, including one in each of the Oxford Handbooks of... ...Comparative Politics, ...Political Economy, and ...Political Methodology--and several other published works on, for example, empirical modeling of context-conditionality, interactions and nonlinearities, spatial interdependence, and multilevel data; the monetary-, fiscal-, (re)distributive-, trade- and other economic-policy effects of, for example, participation, representation, veto actors, delegation, central bank independence, wage bargaining institutions, and international context and institutions.