Norman Schofield

Norman Schofield (1944 to 2019) was a Scottish-American political scientist who held the William Taussig chair of political economy at Washington University in St. Louis. He studied physics and mathematics at the University of Liverpool and earned two doctorates at Essex University, one in government and one in economics, then taught at Essex and at the University of Texas at Austin before joining Washington University in 1986. His books apply mathematical methods to collective decision making, including Social Choice and Democracy, Multiparty Government with Michael Laver on the politics of coalitions in Europe, Architects of Political Change on constitutional quandaries and social choice theory, Multiparty Democracy with Itai Sened, and The Spatial Model of Politics. In 2002 he received the William H. Riker Prize for his contributions to the theory of collective choice in multidimensional settings and its extension to coalition politics and American constitutional politics, and in 2005 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.