Dr Samuel DeCanio FRGS, FRHistS, is a Reader in the Department of Political Economy. His research examines theoretical questions regarding how knowledge interacts with economic and political institutions, and historical questions involving mass political behavior, premodern governance, and the creation of modern bureaucratic states. Dr DeCanio’s articles have appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, Critical Review, Essays in Economic and Business History, Journal of Politics, Journal of Regulatory Economics, Party Politics, Politics Philosophy & Economics, Social Philosophy and Policy, and Studies in American Political Development. His first book, Democracy and the Origins of the American Regulatory State (Yale University Press, 2015), examines democratic control over the creation of the American regulatory state in the late 19th century and argues high levels of public ignorance prevented voters from controlling important policy decisions at key moments in American political development.

His current book manuscript, Politics, Markets, and War: How Conflict and Ignorance Shape the Modern World (advanced contract with Yale University Press), examines how knowledge and ignorance influence economic markets, democratic politics, and the causes of war among states. The book attributes the irrationalities of modern political life to information problems exhibited by public decisions, and specifically focuses on how the singular nature of states’ decisions limits opportunities to observe policy counterfactuals or generate experimental political knowledge.

Dr DeCanio is also interested in how statistical ideas regarding scientific experiments’ inferential properties account for markets’ informational function, and how these ideas can be applied to help understand the problems monopoly power creates and the challenges facing the efficient provision of public goods. His current work in American political development examines changes in how progressives such as Walter Lippmann and Herbert Croly viewed the powers of the state. He is also studying the critiques of modernity and technology made by British Arabists such as Wilfred Thesiger and John “Pasha” Glubb. As part of these interests, Dr DeCanio directs the Centre for Nomadic Studies which conducts an oral history project interviewing people continuing to lead a semi-nomadic existence, and digitizes archival materials from explorers and travel writers such as T. E. Lawrence and Bruce Chatwin.

Dr DeCanio has received grants from the British Academy, the John Templeton Foundation, the Raheem Sterling Foundation, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Oxford Russia Fund. In 2023 Dr DeCanio was awarded the Thesiger-Oman International Fellowship from the Royal Geographical Society for his research into British travel writers and the Bedouin of the Middle East. Dr DeCanio is Editor of Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society, he is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Historical Society, and co-directs (with Dr Michael Bankole) the Raheem Sterling Scholarship Program at King’s College London. Prior to arriving at King’s he was an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at Yale University where he was also a resident fellow of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies.

Teaching

• American Political Development
• Comparative Political Economy