Peter Carl Ordeshook (born May 21, 1942) is an American political scientist. He is the Mary Stillman Harkness Professor of Political Science at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. He held faculty positions at Carnegie Mellon University (1968–1982) and the University of Texas at Austin (1982–1987), where he served as the Frank C. Erwin Jr. Centennial Chair in Government. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University from 1975 to 1976, and he was the president of the Public Choice Society from 1986 to 1988. He has been a professor at Caltech since 1987. He has authored influential papers and books, such as "The Calculus of Voting" (co-authored with William H. Riker). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Early life and education Peter Ordeshook was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, May 21, 1942, the son of Mary Romanowicz and Peter Ordeshook whose parents had emigrated from Poland and Ukraine respectively in 1907. His Ukrainian side of the family came from Kamin-Kashyrskyi of Volyn area in Ukraine. He attended Chelsea High School. Odershook graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964 with a Bachelor of Science degree in economics, politics, and engineering. He enrolled for graduate studies at the University of Rochester and received his Ph.D. in Political Science in 1969. Academic Career Ordeshook's academic career spans a broad spectrum in political science, covering areas as diverse as the election process, international relations, and applications of game theory to politics. Formal Theory in Political Science Ordeshook was one of the pioneers who introduced formal mathematical models into political science, and has been highly influential in the field. Experimental and Empirical Political Science Richard McKelvey and Peter Ordeshook were early developers of laboratory experiments that showed how people can use relatively simple pieces of information to make complex political decisions. Specifically, they examined when uninformed voters can use cues from polls and endorsements to cast the same votes they would have cast if they were more informed. One experiment focused on whether these cues could lead otherwise uninformed voters to have a thought like “if that many voters are voting for the [rightist candidate], he can’t be too liberal” and use that fact to figure out how they would vote if they knew more about the issues (McKelvey and Ordeshook 1985). Political economist Thomas Palfrey