Barbara Geddes is a professor of Political Science at University of California, Los Angeles. Her 1999 article in the Annual Review of Political Science is credited with changing the way social scientists think about dictatorships. She developed the theoretical reasons for using characteristics of the group that established the dictatorship as the basis for explaining dictatorial decisions and began the first systematic collection of data about these groups and the dictatorships they initiated. She has written extensively on regime transition and dictatorship, as well as research design in comparative politics.