Associate Professor and Honors Program Director at Northwestern University

PhD, Yale University

Professor Winters specializes on oligarchs and elites spanning a range of historical and contemporary cases, including ancient Athens and Rome, medieval Europe, the United States, as well as Indonesia, Singapore, and the Philippines. His new book, entitled Oligarchy, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. His research, publications, and teaching focus on the areas of comparative and international political economy, as well as comparative politics generally. Important themes in his work in addition to oligarchy include state-capital relations, capital mobility and the structural power of investors, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank, human rights, authoritarianism, and democratic transitions in post-colonial states. He has conducted extensive research in the region of Southeast Asia.

His first book, Power in Motion: Capital Mobility and the Indonesian State (Cornell University Press, 1996), explores the highly undemocratic structural power of those who control the investment resources everyone else depends upon for their survival. With Jonathan Pincus, he co-edited Reinventing the World Bank (Cornell University Press, 2002), a wide-ranging critique of the Bank's structure and operation. In this volume Winters explores the problem of "criminal debt," especially in the Indonesian context. Both books were translated into Indonesian and published in Jakarta. He has also published two other books in Indonesian: in 1999, Dosa-Dosa Politik Orde Baru [Political Sins of Suharto's New Order], the best-selling book in Indonesia that year, and, in 2004, Orba Jatuh, Orba Bertahan? [Indonesia's "New Order" Falls or Endures?]. With co-author Prof. Ben Page, he wrote "Oligarchy in the United States?" which appeared in Perspectives on Politics in 2009.

For centuries, oligarchs were viewed as empowered by wealth, an idea muddled by elite theory early in the twentieth century. The common thread for oligarchs across history is that wealth defines them, empowers them, and inherently exposes them to threats. The existential motive of all oligarchs is wealth defense. How they respond varies with the threats they confront, including how directly involved they are in supplying the coercion underlying all property claims, and whether they act separately or collectively. These variations yield four types of oligarchy: warring, ruling, sultanistic, and civil. Oligarchy is not displaced by democracy but rather is fused with it. Moreover, the rule of law problem in many societies is a matter of taming oligarchs. Cases studied in this book include the United States, ancient Athens and Rome, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, medieval Venice and Siena, mafia commissions in the United States and Italy, feuding Appalachian families, and early chiefs cum oligarchs dating from 2300 BCE.