Dr. Peter Stone

Peter Stone received his B.A. in Political Science from Pennsylvania State University in 1993. While at Penn State, he completed a Senior Honors Thesis entitled "Towards the Empowerment of Labor: The Allende Experience." He then entered postgraduate study in Political Science at the University of Rochester, receiving an M.A. in 1996 and a Ph.D. in 2000. His Dissertation was entitled "The Luck of the Draw: Revisiting the Lot as a Democratic Institution." From 2003 to 2010 he was Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He then spent a year as Faculty Fellow at Tulane University's Center for Ethics and Public Affairs before becoming Ussher Assistant Professor of Political Science (Political Theory) at Trinity College Dublin in fall 2011. Stone specializes in political theory, especially such areas as democratic theory, theories of justice, rational choice theory, and the philosophy of social science. He is particularly concerned with questions involving the scope and limits of human reason. He is the author of The Luck of the Draw: The Role of Lotteries in Decision Making (Oxford University Press, 2011) and the editor of Lotteries in Public Life: A Reader (Imprint Academic, 2011). He has published articles in such peer-reviewed journals as the Journal of Political Philosophy, the Journal of Theoretical Politics, Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, Rationality and Society, Social Science Information, Social Theory and Practice, and Theory and Research in Education. He belongs to many professional societies including the American Political Science Association, the Association for Political Theory, the Bertrand Russell Society, the Political Studies Association, and the Political Studies Association of Ireland. When not working on political science, he enjoys swing dancing, the music of Leonard Cohen, and the occasional game of poker.

  BEHAVIORAL/SOCIAL SCIENCES   bertrand russell   citizen juries   Comparative political institutions   Condorcet Jury Theorem   Decision Making   DEMOCRACY   Democratic Equality   Formal Theory (Political Science)   Game Theory   Global Justice   INSTITUTIONS   JUSTICE   Lotteries   Political Methodology   Political Philosophy   Political Science   Political Theory   Rational Choice Theory   RATIONALITY   Theories of Global Justice

I am a political theorist, with a research focus on the politics of random selection (selection via lottery). Lotteries are used both to allocate social benefits and burdens (e.g., admission to oversubscribed courses in Irish universities) and to assign public responsibilities (e.g., service in Ireland's Convention on the Constitution and subsequent Citizens' Assemblies). I have developed a systematic theory of random selection focused upon the ability of lotteries to exclude undesirable reasons from decision making, which I call the sanitizing effect. I have articulated this theory--what I call the lottery principle--in a series of peer-reviewed publications in top political science journals, including the Journal of Political Philosophy, Political Theory, and the Journal of Theoretical Politics. I then presented the full theory in a single-authored peer-reviewed monograph published by Oxford University Press. Since then, I have focused my research on random selection and democracy, comparing randomly-selected citizens' assemblies with elections and referenda as democratic decision-making procedures. This work regularly generates invitations to contribute to peer-reviewed collections issued by leading publishers, including The Politics of Presidential Term Limits (Oxford University Press), Militant Democracy and Its Critics: Populism, Parties, Extremism (Edinburgh University Press), the Oxford Handbook of Political Representation in Liberal Democracies, the Oxford Handbook of Irish Politics, and the Handbook of Equality of Opportunity (Springer). I have also produced high-quality work in other areas, notably the philosophy of Bertrand Russell. In 2016, I co-edited the peer-reviewed anthology Bertrand Russell: Public Intellectual (Tiger Bark Press), which won the 2017 Bertrand Russell Society Book Award. Overall, I have developed a proven track record as an international researcher, with 67 peer-reviewed publications to date. This work has received sustained scholarly attention, with a citation count of 903 on Google Scholar (h-index 13), 304 on Scopus (h-index 8), and 511 on ResearchGate (h-index 10).