I'm a political theorist. I research how power distorts our understanding of social reality, and what that says about the legitimacy of social and political institutions--a question I address from an epistemic rather than moral point of view. 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. I try to show that there are empirically observable phenomena that yield evaluative political judgments. The rough idea is this. When we believe in the legitimacy of power as a result of the workings of that very power, 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 work as contributing to the radical realist research 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 here (the automatically-generated list of publications on this site is more or less complete, but it lacks many links and full-texts).

Here at the UvA 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, and have advisory and editorial roles on the boards of various other journals. I'm a director of the Radical Critical Theory Circle, and a past director of Amsterdam Centre for Political Thought, where I remain on the Advisory Board. 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). I did my PhD in philosophy, at St Andrews.