I am an Associate Professor of political science at Northwestern University. I received my PhD in political science from Yale University (2016).

My current work focuses on three related themes. First, I am interested in how we should think about the collective agency of “the sovereign people,” both as a matter of abstract philosophy and as a matter of concrete public policy (see The people’s duty, Cambridge University Press, 2019). Second, my current work also examines the moral value of integrity, whether applied to ordinary people, to authoritarian demagogues, or to collective institutions (see Integrity, personal and political, Oxford University Press, 2020). Finally, I explore what political philosophy can contribute when facing obvious moral failures in public policy (the subject of my third book, Philosophizing the indefensible, out with Oxford University Press in 2023). The same themes inform most of my journal articles, including essays in the American Political Science Review (2016), the Journal of Politics (2015 and 2018), the American Journal of Political Science (2018), and Ethics (2019 and 2020).

My inquiries into these three themes started with a focus on corruption issues. In particular, I was interested in global corruption related to the “resource curse” and in philosophical questions that this “curse” raises about public property and democracy, as well as about the practical tasks of political philosophy. More recently, I have sought to connect my global theory arguments to domestic politics, paying special attention to morally fraught dynamics in various developing countries, in the United States, and in my native Israel. My interest in the persistence of corruption also underlies a fourth book (Beyond the law’s reach, forthcoming with OUP), dealing with various rule-of-law pathologies from both an applied and a meta-theoretical perspective.

Please click the tabs above for more info on the book manuscripts, or here for the full list of journal articles. For my academia.edu page, click here.