About

Jenna Bednar is a Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Michigan. She serves as the inaugural faculty director of UMICH Votes and Democratic Engagement in the provost’s office, leading the campus’s voting infrastructure and co-chairing the Year of Democracy and Civic Engagement, a campus-wide effort to enhance democracy-related research, curriculum, and engagement. Her research focuses on how collective action builds social goods and the role institutions play in facilitating collaboration. Her work includes designing robust systems, particularly within federal democracies, exploring the interdependence of norms, culture, and institutions, and developing place-based public policies to support human social flourishing. Her 2019 book, The Robust Federation: Principles of Design, received the APSA Martha Derthick Best Book Award, and she was named an APSA Daniel Elazar Distinguished Federalism Scholar in 2020. She has held fellowships at Stanford University and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and has been a member of the external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute since 2011. Dr. Bednar earned her B.A. from the University of Michigan and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Political economy
• Economics
• Law and economics
• Law

Selected publications

• Complexity and Paradigm Change in Economics

  SFI Press eBooks · 2026-02-11

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  SFI Press eBooks · 2026-02-11

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• What does the public want their local government to hear? A data-driven case study of public comments across the state of Michigan

  Journal of Quantitative Description Digital Media · 2026-01-04

  articleOpen access

  City council meetings are vital sites for civic participation where the public can speak directly to their local government. By addressing city officials and calling on them to take action, public commenters can potentially influence policy decisions spanning a broad range of concerns, from housing, to sustainability, to social justice. Yet studies of these meetings have often been limited by the availability of large-scale, geographically-diverse data. Relying on local governments’ increasing use of YouTube and other technologies to archive their public meetings, we propose a framework that characterizes comments along two dimensions: local concerns (e.g., housing, election administration), and societal concerns (e.g., functional democracy, anti-racism). Based on a large record of public comments we collect from 15 cities in Michigan, we produce data-driven taxonomies of the local concerns and societal concerns that these comments cover, and employ machine learning methods to scalably apply our taxonomies across the entire dataset. We then demonstrate how our framework allows us to examine the salient local concerns and societal concerns that arise in our data, as well as how these aspects interact.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• What does the public want their local government to hear? A data-driven case study of public comments across the state of Michigan

  Journal of Quantitative Description Digital Media · 2026-01-04 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  City council meetings are vital sites for civic participation where the public can speak directly to their local government. By addressing city officials and calling on them to take action, public commenters can potentially influence policy decisions spanning a broad range of concerns, from housing, to sustainability, to social justice. Yet studies of these meetings have often been limited by the availability of large-scale, geographically-diverse data. Relying on local governments’ increasing use of YouTube and other technologies to archive their public meetings, we propose a framework that characterizes comments along two dimensions: local concerns (e.g., housing, election administration), and societal concerns (e.g., functional democracy, anti-racism). Based on a large record of public comments we collect from 15 cities in Michigan, we produce data-driven taxonomies of the local concerns and societal concerns that these comments cover, and employ machine learning methods to scalably apply our taxonomies across the entire dataset. We then demonstrate how our framework allows us to examine the salient local concerns and societal concerns that arise in our data, as well as how these aspects interact.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Brief History of the Emergence of Complexity Economics

  SFI Press eBooks · 2026-02-11

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Complex systems approaches to 21st century challenges: Introduction to the Special Issue

  Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization · 2025-05-19

  articleOpen access1st author
  PublisherDOI

• Institutions and cultural capacity: A systems perspective

  Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization · 2025-04-25 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• How Collaboration Breaks Down

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2025-01-21

  book-chapterOpen access

  Humans may be "super-cooperators," but no collaboration lasts forever.This chapter summarizes the outcome of an interdisciplinary collaboration between political, social, economic, and cognitive scientists into the question of collaboration collapse.It locates the breakdown of collaboration downstream from the failure to align on either values or actions.A fourfold taxonomy is presented of the consequence of these failures: catastrophic collapse, generative reboot, contested persistence, and sputter on launch.Each failure mode is illustrated by case studies (e.g., the breakup of the Beatles, the collapse of the Hawai'ian kapu system, the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, kinship taxation, resistance to antibiotics) to demonstrate how general principles of our taxonomy unfold over a range of historical, political, and economic contexts.Understanding the mechanisms that underpin successful collaborations and the taxonomies of dysfunction might inform eff orts in pursuit of stable collaboration and enable interventions that do not disrupt or enfeeble alignment mechanisms.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Institutions and Cultural Capacity: A Systems Perspective

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Can continental transboundary compacts hold water?

  Nature Communications · 2024-08-17 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access

  The growing number of threats facing continental-scale transboundary water treaties warrants contemporary evaluation of not only the political and climatological conditions under which they were constructed, but also of how different management strategies for accommodating changes in those conditions can lead to treaty success or failure. We assess these threats by highlighting key attributes and vulnerabilities of water treaties across North America that frame a diverse set of future water management priorities. While these threats are ubiquitous globally, they are particularly pronounced in North America where water-abundant basins along the border between the United States (US) and Canada contrast with arid basins along the border between the US and Mexico. We propose addressing these needs through a three-step call to action for management agencies, politicians, and the public at large to embrace a holistic perspective on transboundary water agreements.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Scott E. Page

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  25 shared

• John Ferejohn

  5 shared

• Vicken Hillis

  Boise State University

  5 shared

• Marco A. Janssen

  Institute for Sustainable Development

  5 shared

• Paul E. Smaldino

  5 shared

• Andrea Jones-Rooy

  3 shared

• Elisabeth R. Gerber

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  3 shared

• Tracy Xiao Liu

  3 shared

Labs

• Jenna BednarPI

Education

• PhD, Political Science

  Stanford University

  1998

• A.B.

  University of Michigan

  1990

Awards & honors

• APSA Martha Derthick Best Book Award (2019)
• APSA Daniel Elazar Distinguished Federalism Scholar (2020)