Richard Franklin Bensel (born 1949) is a professor of American politics at Cornell University.
Bensel has attempted to bridge the gap between American economic and political history, with an eye toward comparative implications.
His most recent work, Passions and Preferences: William Jennings Bryan and the 1896 Democratic National Convention (Cambridge University Press, 2008), attempts to bring American political development into a conversation with rational choice theory.
In an important 2003 exchange published in Studies in American Political Development, John Gerring, Stephen Skowronek, Rogers Smith, and Bensel offered their thoughts on the state of APD as a subfield.
Its goal, he argued, "should be to destroy disciplinary boundaries, to sabotage reifying conventions, to identify and support intellectual rebellions wherever they appear, and to do our best to make sense of whatever space we may have cleared and claimed for ourselves.