About

I am a political philosopher working on democracy and the institutions through which societies understand and govern themselves. My research has taken me through public opinion and opinion polling, political representation, elections and plebiscites, solidarity, and depoliticization. The question connecting these subjects is simple but difficult: how can democracy give people a real capacity for collective self-government?

Much of my recent work has focused on the transformation of democracy under the influence of plebiscitarian institutions. I study public opinion polling not simply as a technique for measuring what people think, but as a political institution—one that changes how societies see themselves and how political representation works. My doctoral dissertation at the New School for Social Research, The Politics of Polls: Representation and Democracy in the Age of Public Opinion Polling, develops this argument.

My current work moves in two directions. One is the relationship between democracy and personalized political power, and particularly the monarchical elements that persist within modern democratic institutions. The other asks how institutions can make democracy a collective experience rather than simply a procedure for choosing rulers—creating political agency, solidarity, and meaningful self-government.

I am a co-founder of the Institute for Global Reconstitution (IGRec). Earlier, I founded and led the Center for Prospective Studies at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, where we built an interdisciplinary research program around democratic representation and social solidarity and carried out more than fifteen national and cross-national projects.

From 2022 to 2025, I was a Research Fellow at Princeton University. During my first year, I was affiliated with the University Center for Human Values and the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination; I later joined the Davis Center for Historical Studies. I taught for a decade at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, where I co-launched and co-led a British-Russian MA program in Political Philosophy.

I hold a PhD in Politics from the New School for Social Research and an earlier PhD in Philosophy from the Higher School of Economics, with a dissertation on Husserl's philosophy of science. My original training was in sociology at the Higher School of Economics and the University of Manchester.