Paul Hutchcroft is a scholar of comparative and Southeast Asian politics who has written extensively on Philippine politics and political economy. He is professor of Political and Social Change in the Australian National University’s Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs (of which he was founding director, 2009-2013). While on secondment from the ANU, between late 2013 and late 2017, Hutchcroft served as Lead Governance Specialist with the Australian Embassy in Manila. From 2018 to 2021, he was the overall chief investigator of a A$2.1 million Australian government grant to the ANU to support a range of research and advocacy projects on democracy, human rights, and the rule of law in Southeast Asia (see https://psc.bellschool.anu.edu.au/searbo-supporting-rules-based-order-southeast-asia). Most recently, he played a key role in the initial creation of the ANU Philippines Institute, launched in late 2023 with a A$2.5 million grant from the Australian government, and is part of the institute's core working group.

Hutchcroft is the author of Booty Capitalism: The Politics of Banking in the Philippines (Cornell 1998); co-author (with Edward Aspinall, Meredith Weiss, and Allen Hicken) of Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (Cambridge 2022); editor of Mindanao: The Long Journey to Peace and Prosperity (Anvil 2016 and World Scientific 2018) as well as Strong Patronage, Weak Parties: The Case for Electoral System Redesign in the Philippines (Anvil 2019 and World Scientific 2020); and co-editor (with Edward Aspinall, Allen Hicken, and Meredith Weiss) of two special journal issues: “Global Pandemic, Local Politics: COVID-19 in Urban Southeast Asia,” a roundtable published by Contemporary Southeast Asia (2021), and "The Politics of Government–Business Relations in Urban Southeast Asia," published by the Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs (forthcoming 2024). He has published in Governance, Government and Opposition, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs (forthcoming 2024), Journal of Democracy, Journal of East Asian Studies, New Mandala, Philippine Political Science Journal, Philippine Review of Economics, Political Studies, TRaNS, and World Politics, and contributed chapters in edited volumes published by Ateneo, Cambridge, Cornell, Georgetown, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Oxford, National University of Singapore, Wisconsin, and other university presses as well as by Asia Society, Freedom House, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, and Routledge.

Hutchcroft’s interests in Southeast Asian politics can be traced to 1980-81, when he first lived in the Philippines and witnessed mounting opposition to the rule of Ferdinand Marcos. This eventually led him into Southeast Asian studies at Yale University, where he completed an M.A. in International Relations (1986) and a Ph.D. in Political Science (with distinction, in 1993). He finished his dissertation while at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies (1991-1993), and proceeded to fifteen years of service on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1993-2008, where he was Associate Chair of the Department of Political Science from 2004 to 2007). He joined the ANU in 2008 and was chair of the Department of Political and Social Change in 2008-2009.

In addition, Hutchcroft was a Visiting Associate Professor at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore in 2004 and has received fellowships from Fulbright-Hays (1989, 1995-96, and 2003), Social Science Research Council (1990-91), American Council of Learned Societies-SSRC (1999), U.S. Institute of Peace (2001), and the Asia Research Institute (2005). In 2007, he was Program Chair for the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Boston, Massachusetts; currently (2023-2026), he is a member of the AAS Southeast Asia Council. At the ANU, he has been a part of teams that obtained Australian Research Council grants for two major collaborative research projects in Southeast Asia: on money politics (2012-2017) and urban politics (2018-present).

Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, Ph.D. in Political Science (with distinction), 1993. M.A. in International Relations, 1986. Winner of 1986 Academic Excellence Award.

Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota, B.A. in History (summa cum laude), 1980. Studied at Stirling University, Scotland,1978-79, as part of Stirling-Macalester Exchange.

Comparative politics and Southeast Asian politics, with particular interests in state formation and territorial politics, the politics of patronage, political reform and democratic quality, state-society relations, structures of governance, and corruption.