​I am a postdoctoral fellow at Utrecht University. I work in political theory/philosophy, in the interdisciplinary tradition of politics, philosophy and economics.

I work on a research project entitled "Private Property and Political Power in a Liberal-Democratic Society", led by Rutger Claassen.  We recently launched a Massive Online Open Course on Inequality and Democracy that's free for anyone to take. My current research focuses on business corporations. I am investigating the idea of market competition as a device to keep corporations accountable to the public good. I am also interested in other proposals to keep corporations accountable, for example  by cultivating countervailing forces such as labour unions. 

In 2017, I completed my PhD at the University of York, entitled, "Democracy and its Relationship with the Market: Impartial Instrumentalism in Politics and Constitutional Design." I develop an epistemic justification of democracy, and look at how markets pose a challenge to democracy justified in these terms.
My supervisors were Martin O'Neill and Matthew Festenstein, and my external examiner was Albert Weale. 

In 2019 I was a visitor at the London School of Economics, sponsored by Kai Spiekermann. In 2015 I was a visiting student at the University of Arizona, sponsored by Thomas Christiano. Before that, I did an MSc in Political Theory at Oxford University, and (some years before) a BA in History at Oxford.

My page on Utrecht's website

m.p.b.bennett@uu.nl