Bio

My full CV is available here.

I am Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Nuffield College and the University of Oxford, and Inaugural Director of the Centre for Advanced Social Science Methods at the University of Oxford. I am also Course Director of the MSc in Law, Governance and AI. I was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2018, and I am a member of the Advisory Board of the Bennett School of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge.

I am the host of BBC Radio 4’s Rethink. In 2023 I was the BBC’s Reith Lecturer, giving a series of four lectures titled ‘Our Democratic Future’, and I hosted ‘What’s Wrong with Democracy?’ for Tortoise Media. I’m the author of Why Politics Fails, published by Viking and PublicAffairs. I am UK Politics Columnist for Prospect and write the Substack Political Calculus. I’m co-editor, with David Samuels and Dawn Teele, of Comparative Political Studies.

In brief: I was born in Palo Alto, California but grew up in Kent in the United Kingdom. I studied History at Manchester University, where I was awarded the Thomas Brown Memorial Prize. I then took a Masters in History also at Manchester. In 2000, I left the UK to head back to California, where I enrolled at UC Berkeley in political science, earning a Masters degree.

I then moved to Harvard University, where I completed my PhD general exams and wrote my dissertation: From the Ballot to the Blackboard, a study of the impact of politics on education spending, which won the Senator Charles A. Sumner Dissertation Prize. The dissertation was the basis for my 2010 book of the same title, available at Cambridge University Press, and winner of the 2011 William Riker prize for best book awarded by the Political Economy section of the American Political Science Association.

From 2006 to 2013 I taught Political Science at the University of Minnesota. In July 2013 I joined the University of Oxford as Professor in Comparative Democratic Institutions at Nuffield College.

My research covers a broad range of issues in political economy, from education, to inequality, to housing, to democracy, and much of it is available on my papers page. I was Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded WEALTHPOL project on the politics of wealth inequality, which studied how housing and wealth shape political preferences. With Johannes Lindvall I coauthored Inward Conquest: The Political Origins of Modern Public Services (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and with David Samuels I coauthored Inequality and Democratization: An Elite-Competition Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2014), winner of the 2015 Woodrow Wilson prize for the best book on government, politics or international affairs and the 2015 William Riker prize for the best book in political economy.

I have also worked as an academic consultant to HM Treasury in the UK and for the Leitch Review of Skills, which advised the UK government on long-term education policy. Since then I have written policy work for UK and European audiences, most recently for IPPR and the IFS Deaton Review. These are collected on my policy page.