Dan Posner is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at UCLA. His research and teaching focuses on ethnic politics, research design, and the political economy of development in Africa. He is the co-organizer of the Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE).

His research focuses on ethnic politics, research design, distributive politics and the political economy of development in Africa. His most recent co-authored book, Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action (Russell Sage, 2009) employs experimental games to probe the sources of poor public goods provision in ethnically diverse communities. His first book, Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa (Cambridge, 2005), explains the conditions under which politics revolves around one dimension of ethnic cleavage rather than another.