David Fortunato

David Fortunato is a student of political economy and political institutions and joins CASBS from the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego to work on two projects. The first is on the distributional effects of trade policy across race-gender groups in the United States and around the world: how do government choices over trade barriers affect the lived experience and particularly the earnings of different groups, and, to which groups are governments responsive in making these choices? The second is on the institutional capacity of legislatures to control policy outcomes: why do some legislatures choose to invest in the resources necessary to learn what their voters want, design policy to yield that outcome, and then coerce the bureaucracy into actually delivering it, while other legislatures choose to deny themselves these resources?

Fortunato’s past research, including work on coalition governance, party politics, political behavior and cognition, sovereign borrowing and debt, trade policy, and other topics can be found on his professional website: davidfortunato.com