Hello! My name is Giorgio Giovanni (but everybody calls me Giorgio) and I'm a doctoral candidate in political economy at Chicago. My committee chair is Scott Gehlbach. My research is in authoritarian politics and formal theory. Currently, my work focuses on collective punishment and collective responsibility.

I am on the 2025-26 job market. You can find my updated CV here.

My job market paper studies how punishing people for the actions of their peers encourages self-policing within groups. This creates a trade-off: while collective punishment fosters "horizontal" deterrence by incentivizing people to police their peers, it always weakens “vertical” deterrence (the direct effect from ruler to individual), because people are less deterred by sanctions if they expect they may be punished no matter what. 

The rest of my dissertation focuses on informational explanations for collective punishments. The second chapter studies indiscriminate violence as a credible signal of cruelty: cruel rulers (those who can impose more costly punishments on people at lower costs to themselves) can credibly "set themselves apart" by punishing innocents. The  third chapter studies how collective punishment can help extract verifiable information from a group of people by incentivizing them to talk to each other.

My interests also include manipulated elections and social choice theory.

Before coming to Chicago, I earned an MPhil in Politics from Oxford and a BSc in International Politics and Government from Bocconi.

Please feel free to reach out!