McCubbins spent a majority of his career as a distinguished professor and Chancellor's Associates Chair in the Department of Political Science and in the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego.
McCubbins, who also wrote under the pseudonym McNollgast,[3] with Roger G Noll and Barry R Weingast, is perhaps best known for his work on the actions of legislatures.
He put forth the argument that legislative majorities control the veto gates in the legislature which allows them to block unfavorable bills and, thus, allows them to decide what gets voted on and what doesn't.
His most recent experiments have explored the limits of game theory as a tool for understanding cognition.
He has served on the editorial boards of Economics and Politics and Legislative Studies Quarterly, and Public Choice, among others.
He was one of the key organizers for the Behavioral, Social, and Computer Sciences Seminar Series at UC San Diego.
For his books with Gary W. Cox, he received the APSA Legislative Studies Section's 1994 Richard F. Fenno Jr. Prize[10] for Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House; and the APSA 2005 Leon Epstein Award[11][12] for Setting the Agenda: Responsible Party Government in the US House of Representatives.