Congratulations to George Tsebelis for being named the 2025 William H. Riker Prize recipient!
The Riker Prize recognizes a sustained research program or coherent collection of published research that has, in the view of the Riker Prize Committee, advanced the scientific study of politics through excellent, theoretically informed study of real-world politics, creative and influential theoretical study of political phenomena, and the productive combination of theory and empirical study. It is intended neither as an award for a single work nor as a lifetime achievement award. It may be awarded for work outside the specific areas in which Riker conducted his research and, in keeping with the high value Riker placed on interdisciplinary social science, may be awarded for research conducted outside the discipline of political science that has strongly influenced the discipline.
The Riker Prize winner receives a monetary award and is invited to the University of Rochester to present the Riker Lecture and to celebrate the award at a Riker Prize banquet.
In addition to honoring the memory of William Riker, the Riker Prize is intended to continue two projects to which Riker devoted so much of his career: promoting the scientific study of politics and, through bestowing the award and hosting award winners, building the Department of Political Science at the University of Rochester.
George Tsebelis works in Comparative Politics. He is a specialist in political institutions. His work uses game-theoretic models to analyze the effects of institutions; it covers Western European countries and the European Union. More recent work studies institutions in Latin America and in countries of Eastern Europe.
He is the author or co-author of five books: Nested Games (1991 U of California Press), Bicameralism (1997 Cambridge UP), Veto Players (2002, Princeton UP) and Reforming the European Union (2013 Princeton UP); and Changing the Rules (forthcoming with Cambridge UP). His work has been reprinted and translated in several languages (Veto Players has been published in Chinese, Croatian, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish).
He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received Fellowships from the Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Herbert Hoover Foundation. He teaches graduate and undergraduate classes on institutions, the European Union, and advanced industrialized countries.
