Welcome to samueldecanio.com

 

I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. I study American politics; specializing in mass behavior, interest groups, civic engagement, political institutions, state theory, and American political development. Chapters of my dissertation have been published in Critical Review, Journal of Politics, and Studies in American Political Development.

I am specifically interested in studying how elected officials use high levels of voter ignorance to implement policies autonomously from society. In contrast to those who argue that elections and public opinion ensure democratic states obey societal demands, I argue mass ignorance of democratic politics may allow elected officials to implement policies of their choosing. I use this theory to explain how the American bureaucratic state emerged from elite control of monetary policy in the late nineteenth century, specifically focusing on how elected officials created discretionary authority in executive bureaucracies as a means of insulating regulatory policy from popular control. By fusing state theory with empirical public opinion scholarship, my dissertation creates a general theory of democratic politics that rejects some of the most widespread assumptions regarding political power in modern democracies, and offers a specific empirical argument regarding the origins of the American regulatory state as well.