Daniel T. Roberts

Hello, I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University. I will be on the academic job market in Fall 2025.

My research agenda examines "Opportunity Politics" in democracies, focusing on education, credit, and labor market policy reform. In my dissertation project, I compare the recent political history of reforms in these policy areas in the US, Germany, and Japan to understand why efforts to expand opportunity access succeed and fail. My job market paper compares three reform episodes from this project using a mixed methods analysis of public opinion, elections, and policy-making to argue that institutions create strategic reliance on context-specific opportunity boundaries that reduce uncertainty through exclusion for a pivotal middle-class, causing electoral majorities to selectively defend them against reform. My dissertation monograph places these episodes in context by also studying how coalitions of opportunity outsiders, politicians, and vested interest groups jointly pursue gradual reforms that more "quietly" compensates for such politically resilient boundaries, with ambiguous long-term distributive and political consequences. In separate but related research, I study how the political geography of dependence on specific banks' credit provision may complement instrumental interest group influence in explaining the legislative politics of US financial deregulation, building upon peer-reviewed economics scholarship published with co-authors in the Journal of Banking and Finance. 

My teaching history spans fields including Comparative Politics, International Political Economy, American Education Politics, Public Policy, and Political Theory, drawing on my eclectic research history. This breadth is highlighted in the syllabus and seminar I developed on "Opportunity Politics" taught in Spring 2024, building on the themes of my dissertation project and drawing from perspectives in Political Science, Political Theory, Economics, and Sociology.

Before beginning my PhD, I received a B.A. in Economics at the University of Chicago, specializing in Macroeconomics. I then worked as a Research Analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the Capital Markets Section of the Research and Statistics Group, with contributions to studies of bond market liquidity, equity market volatility, and financial regulation. In the course of my PhD, I received a MA in Government at Harvard, and have been a visiting scholar with the Political Economy Research Area at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, the AxPo Observatory of Market Society Polarization at Sciences Po, and Nuffield College at Oxford University while on a Dissertation Research Fellowship granted by the Center for European Studies at Harvard University.

I do also occasionally write at the intersection of film and political theory, reflected in a current project on critiques of imperialism in Japanese cinema, an early version of which was published at Senses of Cinema. Feel free to reach out at danielroberts (at) g.harvard.edu if you have any questions!