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Benjamin Radcliff


Benjamin Radcliff (born August 28, 1963) is an American political scientist and a professor at the University of Notre Dame. He is also affiliated with the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy and the Higgins Labor Studies Program. Best known for his work on the connections between politics and human happiness, his research also encompasses democratic theory, political economy, and the study of organized labor.

Radcliff attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he obtained a B.A. in 1984. He graduated from there in 1991 with a Ph.D. in Political Science. While he has held faculty appointments at Rutgers University and Vanderbilt University, the majority of his academic career has been spent at the University of Notre Dame. He has been a fellow at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities and at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. In 2014 he was in residence as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar at the Roosevelt Study Center, in the Netherlands.

In a series of scholarly articles in the 1990s, Radcliff attempted a radical reinterpretation of the implications for democratic thought of social theory in general, and Arrow's impossibility theorem in particular. Rather than the familiar suggestion, associated most closely with the work of William H. Riker, that Arrow’s work suggested that democracy must by logical necessity be limited to the minimal form associated with classical Liberalism, Radcliff argued that social choice theory actually supported more robust or populistic conceptions of democracy.


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