I study how power distorts our understanding of reality, and what that says about the legitimacy of social and political structures. I address this question from an epistemic rather than moral angle. I try to show that there are empirically observable phenomena that yield normative political judgments. More specifically, I try to arrive at empirically-grounded evaluative judgments driven by epistemic normativity. The rough idea is this. When we believe in the legitimacy of a power structure as a result of the workings of that very power structure, epistemically flawed ideologies become prevalent, and this is normatively suboptimal insofar as …
I study how power distorts our understanding of reality, and what that says about the legitimacy of social and political structures. I address this question from an epistemic rather than moral angle. I try to show that there are empirically observable phenomena that yield normative political judgments. More specifically, I try to arrive at empirically-grounded evaluative judgments driven by epistemic normativity. The rough idea is this. When we believe in the legitimacy of a power structure as a result of the workings of that very power structure, epistemically flawed ideologies become prevalent, and this is normatively suboptimal insofar as it impairs our capacity to make good political decisions.
More generally, I'm concerned with the relationship between the descriptive and the normative study of society and, therefore, with questions of method in political theory. I maintain that 'ethics first', moralistic political theory often misses what's most important about politics, and is at risk of ideological distortion. I see my research as contributing to the radical realist programme: an approach that is suspicious of moral argument in politics and embraces empirical evidence, but without foreclosing far-reaching social and political change.
My recent work has appeared in venues such as the American Political Science Review and The Journal of Politics. Most of my publications and preprints can be freely downloaded from this site.
I work at the University of Amstedam, where I'm an associate professor (universitair hoofddocent) in the Department of Political Science, and the co-director of the Challenges to Democratic Representation Programme Group. I also co-edit the European Journal of Political Theory. I have held various grants as (co-)principal investigator (Dutch Research Council Vidi, 2016-2022; Gerda Henkel Foundation, 2024-2027), and as a member of consortia (EU FP7 and Horizon schemes, and others). My PhD was in philosophy, at St Andrews.
