Current Projects

"Preferences for Representational Styles In the American Public" (with Michael Barber and Adam Dynes)

Citizens say they care about democracy, but the question is only meaningful when signaling a preference for democracy has a price.  We use a survey experiment to test whether citizens still support democratic outcomes when they come at the expense of the respondent's favored policy.   We find that citizens don't care about a policy's demcoratic pedigree as much as they care about getting the outcomes they prefer.

"The Good Deliberative Citizen: How Partisanship Shapes Norms about Deliberative Behaviors" (with Lisa Argyle and Chris Karpowitz)

How much to citizens feel obligated to deliberate withe people they disagree with?  It depends what you mean by 'deliberate' and also what you mean by 'disagree'.  When citizens have opposing political identities, they don't support either trying to persuade or listening.  When they share a political identity but disagree about policy, they do support trying to persuade but still not listening.  In general, citiens don't think about deliberation as the complex package of give-and-take that deliberative theorists imagine it to be.

"Plain Language Politics" (with Jessica Flanigan)

Proponents of ameliorative analysis favor attempting to revise, improve, or change the meaning of existing concepts in order to advance worthwhile moral and political ends.  Examples are wide ranging: <woman>; <racism>; <refugee>; <marriage>; <democracy>; <conspiracy theory> etc.  Sometimes ameliorative projects make good moral sense, but we want to call attention to a cost: they can have inegalitarian consequences.  When they do, it's better to do politics in plain language.

"Constitutivism and the Limits of Obligation"

Can moral norms be explained in terms of merely formal features of agency?  Constitutivists, who answer yes, also usually hold that the resulting moral view fits more or less exactly with standard pre-theoretical intuitions.  Their opponents typically deny that any moral content can be derived from such spare premises.  But let's forget whether the constitutivist magic is real and ask another question: If it did work, what kind of moral norms would it support?  I think if moral norms are constitutive of agency, those norms will be quite minimal in content.  Constitutivists should be revisionists about what morality requires.  

"Justice: Do it."  

This is my favorite and most important paper.  It argues that the facts about permissibility and impermissibilty are the same for political states as they are for any ordinary person.  There are no legitimate but unjust state policies or actions.  Nor are there just but illegitimate policies or actions.

"Love of Status"

Satus is a positional good constituted by the relative approval of others.  Pace skeptics, I think status is as good a value as any, and -- surprisingly -- is often helpful in human relationships.