Thad DunningThad Dunning is Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He is also a research fellow at Yale's Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and co-director, wit Giovanni Maggi, of Yale's Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy. He studies comparative politics, political economy, and methodology. His first book, Crude Democracy: Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes (Cambridge, 2008), won the Best Book Award from the Comparative Democratization Section of APSA and the Gaddis Smith Prize for the best first book on an international topic by a member of the Yale faculty. Dunning has also written on a range of methodological topics; his second book, Natural Experiments in the Social Sciences: A Design-Based Approach (Cambridge, 2012), develops a framework for the discovery, analysis, and evaluation of strong research designs. Read More Read Less