Noah Nathan

Faculty Associate

Noah Nathan is an Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT. His research focuses on electoral politics, political economy, and urban politics in Africa. His first book, Electoral Politics and Africa’s Urban Transition: Class and Ethnicity in Ghana (Cambridge University Press, 2019), examines urbanization’s impacts on ethnic politics, clientelism, and the emergence of programmatic electoral competition. His second book, The Scarce State: Inequality and Political Power in the Hinterland (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), explores long-run legacies of state-building in the rural periphery, where developing states are often at their most absent. His other research has been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Annual Review of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, and World Politics. He received his PhD in Government at Harvard in 2016.