Research Overview

My research lies at the intersection of normative political theory and institutional design. I am primarily concerned with the moral foundations of equality, the structure of democratic legitimacy, and the normative assessment of contemporary social and economic institutions.

Across different projects and publications, my work seeks to connect abstract principles of justice with concrete institutional arrangements, particularly in the domains of welfare-state reform, democratic status, and public policy evaluation.

My research currently develops along three interconnected axes.


1. Equality, Basic Income, and Institutional Design

A central strand of my work examines distributive justice and the institutional implications of egalitarian theory. Drawing on liberal egalitarianism and republican accounts of freedom as non-domination, I investigate how institutions can secure relational equality under conditions of economic transformation.

This line of research has focused in particular on:

Through projects such as UBIEXP and UBIECO, I have developed a philosophical analysis of the epistemology and political justification of basic income experiments, exploring their methodological limits and democratic significance. This research engages both with contemporary political theory and with interdisciplinary debates involving economics, public policy, and empirical social science.


2. Liberal Neutrality, Republicanism, and Public Reason

A second line of research addresses foundational questions in democratic theory, including:

Building on earlier work on political neutrality and value pluralism, I explore tensions between impartial institutional design and the moral demands generated by social and cultural diversity. This research contributes to ongoing debates on constitutional democracy, citizenship, and the limits of state intervention.


3. Love, Partiality, and Relational Equality

More recently, I have begun to investigate the moral and political significance of love and partiality within egalitarian theory.

This research examines how intimate relationships — particularly parental partiality — interact with commitments to equality of opportunity and relational justice. Rather than treating private attachments as external to political theory, I argue that they raise structurally important questions about fairness, institutional design, and the moral limits of equality.

This line of inquiry culminates in a forthcoming book manuscript exploring the political uses and limits of love within contemporary theories of justice.


Methodological Orientation

Methodologically, my work combines:

The overarching aim is to develop political philosophy that is both theoretically rigorous and institutionally relevant.