Jonathan Rodden is a professor in the political science department at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His research and teaching interests are at the intersection of political science, public economics, and geography.

For over 20 years Jonathan has been working on issues related to federalism and various forms of fiscal and political decentralization around the world. In addition to academic research, he has been engaged in policy debates in North America, Europe, Latin America, and Africa in collaboration with the IMF, World Bank, European Central Bank, and OECD. He is currently collaborating with USAID on an edited volume on fiscal decentralization, and on some experiments related to local accountability in Africa.

Much of Jonathan's recent research focuses on political and economic geography. In addition to an ongoing book project, he has written a series of papers on the ways in which electoral districts, when superimposed on patterns of residential geography, can shape representation and public policy.  

He is the founder and director of the Stanford Spatial Social Science Lab—a center for research and teaching focusing on geospatial analysis in the social sciences.