I have three main interconnected research interests.
I am interested in conceptions and theories of civic duty. These address the question of what, if anything, citizens owe each other and their political community. I focus on various normative theories of civic duty, including republicanism and civic liberalism, and their institutional applications.
My research explores regimes and practices of taxation. In particular, I am interested in the theoretical and institutional link of taxation to conceptions of citizenship, democracy, and redistributive justice. I wish to provide critical analyses of our current tax regimes and to develop ideas about future institutional avenues.
I have an interest in military institutions, their variation and operation, and their normative justifications that take real-world power structures into account. A special emphasis of my research is on the idea of substantial citizen involvement in the military (for example, through forms of conscription), its relation to civilian control and military effectiveness, and likely trade-offs between those.
I explore these research interests through the means of institutional political theory. This approach bridges political science and political theory by placing formal institutions, their functional and normative logic, contextual variation, and ethical evaluation front and centre. Being trained as a political scientist and historian of political thought, I bring a strong empirical and historical sensibility to these matters.
‘Evaluating Military Institutions: Towards a New Framework’
Article that develops a normative all-things-considered framework for evaluating different contemporary military institutions. Work in progress.
‘Conceptualising Civic Duty’
Article that develops a conception of civic duty in critical dialogue with the literature on citizenship and political obligation. Work in progress.
Contributing to the Commonwealth. Civic Duties in Modern Germany and the United States
182,000 words | Defended in April, 2023 | Thesis committee: Tine Stein, Dario Castiglione, Marcus Llanque
Awarded the grade summa cum laude, and the Faculty of Social Science’s 2023/24 award for best doctoral dissertation
My dissertation inquires into modern formulations of the duties of citizenship. This is done by entertaining a historical and theoretical approach geared towards better understanding and appreciating one fundamental aspect of modern democratic societies and their polities. More specifically, I analyse and contrast intellectual and institutional formulations of civic duties in two of the most influential modern democratic societies in the Western world: Germany and the United States of America, chiefly from the end of the nineteenth century to the most recent past. A particular though not exclusive emphasis of the inquiry is on the intellectual and institutional development of three core civic duties in the two national contexts: taxpaying, serving in the military, and schooling. These three duties are (or were) the most important and most burdensome legal burdens placed upon a great number of citizens in these two national contexts, and, partly for that reason, feature very prominently in the respective collective consciousness and corresponding political debates.
By means of this historical and theoretical inquiry, I pursue five interrelated objectives: first, I provide a more general systematic and comprehensive analysis of civic duties. Second, I reveal the connection of the core civic duties with modern state development and nation-making. Third, I reconstruct and reconsider diverse traditions and instances of political thought from the late nineteenth to the early to mid-twentieth century that articulate the ethical foundation and institutional realisation of civic duties. Fourth, I inquire into the seemingly rather recent relative demise of civic duties in public political and academic thought in the last couple of decades. And fifth, building upon the analyses, I reassess the role of duties in modern practices and theories of citizenship. This results in a normative theoretical case for partially duty-based citizenship under contemporary sociopolitical conditions, which takes issue with influential philosophical and political currents, in particular libertarianism and exclusively rights-based liberalism.