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. Bensel is best known as a scholar of political economy. 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.