Evaluating Democratic Citizens: A Task-Centered Framework
Empirical research on citizen performance is data-rich but often evaluatively underspecified. Any sound evaluation requires a task, an ideal of performance, and data appropriate to that pairing. This talk motivates a citizenship-specific framework for theorizing good democratic citizenship, showing how different democratic ideals yield competing task specifications, how those specifications imply citizen requirements and external conditions, and how both imply practical strategies, including education, information environments, and institutional design, for helping citizens meet the demands placed on them.
About Benjamin Miller
Benjamin Miller is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he also holds appointments in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and in Classics. His research focuses on democratic citizenship and the skills and values citizens need to preserve and improve democratic well-functioning, with a particular interest in bridging political philosophy and empirical political science. His recent book, Against Aristotelian Character Education: Practical Wisdom, Flourishing, and Liberal Democracy (Routledge, 2025), argues that Aristotle's theory of virtue is fundamentally incompatible with liberal democracy's commitment to pluralism. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Stanford University.
Learn more about Prof. Miller's work and research