Justin de Benedictis-Kessner

Justin de Benedictis-Kessner is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is a political scientist who teaches and does research on American politics, with a particular focus on public policy and political behavior in urban and local politics. 

His current research focuses on some of the most important policy areas that concern government, and which are primarily handled by local governments, such as housing, policing, and transportation. His research examines how citizens hold elected officials accountable, how representation translates their interests into policy via elections, and how people’s policy opinions are formed and swayed.

His work has received the Clarence Stone Emerging Scholar Award and the Norton Long Young Scholar Award from the American Political Science Association, and has been supported by funding from the MIT Election Data + Science Lab, Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS), the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, and the Boston Area Research Initiative. Prior to joining Harvard, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Boston University, and before that a postdoctoral researcher at the Boston Area Research Initiative. He received his PhD from the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his B.A. in Government and Psychology from the College of William & Mary.