Postdoctoral Fellow, SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University

Otto Kienitz holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

His research interests include democracy and autocracy, state-building and state capacity, and local taxation and representation in comparative perspective. He is an expert in Russian politics, including local politics, public goods provision, and the historical political economy of the Russian Empire.

His book manuscript, Between State and Democracy, asks why rulers who faced no democratic pressure nevertheless created local elected assemblies and gave them power over taxation. The answer, he argues, is that these institutions solved a problem no bureaucracy could: getting local elites to reveal accurate information about wealth and pay their share. The book traces how institutions designed for extraction ended up generating public goods, building human capital, and creating pressure for broader political inclusion — across nineteenth-century Europe, Eurasia, and beyond.

His other work explores the political economy of state-building from several directions: how landowning elites responded to decentralization by capturing local bureaucracies (with Igor Kolesnikov), what state capacity actually means and how to study it as a policy problem rather than a single variable (with Ruth Collier), and how proximity to national borders shapes political violence and identity (with Robert Braun).

He is the co-founder of the Berkeley Historical Social Science Workshop (HSSW) and is an advocate for mixed-methods approaches to the study of historical political economy, drawing on his training as a historian and his experience with qualitative archival research and the historiography of empire.

Prior to attending Berkeley, he received his B.A. (Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude) in History with a Minor in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.A. in Russian and Eurasian Studies from the European University at St. Petersburg (Russia), and holds an M.A. in Political Science with Distinction from the University of California, Berkeley.

He comes from a family of musicians, educators, and writers. His grandfather, Richard C. Kienitz, won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 1967 for his reporting on water pollution in Wisconsin.

His full CV is available here and can be reached via email.

There are things / we live among / and to see them / is to know ourselves.

George Oppen, Of Being Numerous (1968)


Russian land grant charter on 17th century vellum