David Ragazzoni is tenure-track Assistant Professor in Political Theory in the Political Science Department at the University of Toronto (St. George campus), where he writes in liberal democratic theory and the history of political thought and teaches at undergraduate and PhD levels. He is also an affiliated scholar at the Association for Global Political Thought (based at Harvard and partner institutions). He was a postdoctoral research fellow at NYU School of Law (2024-2025), Core Lecturer in Contemporary Civilization at Columbia University (2023-2024), and Early Career Lecturer in the Discipline of Political Science at Columbia University (2022-2023), serving as a faculty advisor for its MA Program in Political Theory. He received MA (2016), MPhil (2018), and PhD (2022) degrees in Political Science from Columbia University, and undergraduate and graduate degrees in the history of political philosophy from Scuola Normale Superiore and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa (Italy). In 2018 he was awarded two National Scientific Habilitations as Associate Professor in the Italian academic system for his Italian books and journal articles (in the fields of Political Theory and History of Philosophy).

His research draws on the history of political and constitutional thought to theorize the challenges to liberal democracies in our populist and hyper-polarized present, with a focus on historical and contemporary debates on parties, leaders, and political representation. He also maintains wide-ranging interests in the history of 20th-centurydemocratic theory (specifically procedural democracy and its early 21st-century resources), the study of political ideologies, and Enlightenment political philosophy (specifically the work of Cesare Beccaria and its contribution to the theory and practice of the rule of law).

His work in English so far has appeared in “Ethics and International Affairs”, “Journal of Political Ideologies”, “Constellations. An International Journal of Democratic and Critical Theory”, “Political Theory”, “Cambridge Review of International Affairs”, as well in numerous volumes, including “Compromise and Disagreement in Contemporary Political Theory” (Routledge), “Multiple Populisms: Italy as Democracy’s Mirror” (Routledge), “Cultural History of Democracy” (Bloomsbury Academic), and “Rhetoric, Demagoguery, and Populism in Historical Perspective” (Oxford UP). He is a co-author (and the co-editor, with Sandrine Baume) of “Hans Kelsen on Constitutional Democracy: Genesis, Theory, Legacies”, currently in press with Cambridge UP for the Cambridge Studies in Constitutional Lawseries (2025). Together with Lars Vinx he is co-editing “Hans Kelsen: Selected Writings on Constitutional Democracy and Political Philosophy” (under contract with Oxford UP Constitutional Theory series, transl. Vinx) and, together with Cristina Lafont and Nadia Urbinati, he is the co-editor (and a co-author) of “Handbook of Democratic Theory” (the first textbook entirely dedicated to this subfield).

David’s work at Columbia University received research and teaching awards, including the 2017 Doria Prize Award(for the best research paper by a PhD candidate across the subfields of Political Science, awarded by Jon Elster), the 2022 Teaching Excellence Core Preceptor Award in Contemporary Civilization (for the academic year’s best Instructor of Record, among doctoral candidates, teaching the flagship course in the history of political thought in Columbia’s Core Curriculum), and the Douglas Chalmers Graduate Scholars Lectureship (Spring 2024), assigned by the Emeriti Professors at Columbia (EPIC) and honoring every semester one junior scholar whose work is considered groundbreaking, timely, and cross-disciplinary. The EPIC public lecture that David delivered was titled” Why Political Parties Matter and How to Make Them Better: Rethinking Party Democracy in Dark Times”.