Andrew O’Donohue

Welcome!

I am the Carl J. Friedrich Fellow in the Government Department at Harvard University, the Carlson and Nelson Graduate Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment. My research studies law and courts, democratic backsliding, and Middle East politics, with a focus on Turkey and Israel.

My research has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nexus and The Journal of Democracy. My book, Democracies Divided: The Global Challenge of Political Polarization, co-edited with Thomas Carothers, was published by the Brookings Institution Press. My writing has also been published by The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

My work has been cited 750+ times on Google Scholar, in The New York Times (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), and before the U.S. Supreme Court. At Harvard, I am an affiliate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Prior to graduate school, I was a James C. Gaither Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a research fellow at Sabancı University's Istanbul Policy Center.

I am on the 2025-26 job market. My JMP, available here, won two Best Paper Awards from APSA.

Democracies Divided: The Global Challenge of Political Polarization (co-edited with Thomas Carothers). Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2019.
[Contents] [Introduction] [Turkey Chapter]

1. The Court of Public Opinion: The Limited Effects of Elite Rhetoric about Prosecuting Political Leaders (with Daniel B. Markovits). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nexus. 2025.
   [Article] [Pre-Analysis Plan] [Replication Files]
2. Is Israel Losing Its Last Democratic Safeguard? (with Oded Haklai). The Journal of Democracy. 2024.

1. Law versus Democracy: Judicial Selection Institutions, Court Capture, and Democratic Backsliding in Turkey.
   [Working Paper]
2. How Incumbents Survive Economic Crises: Theory and Evidence from Turkey (with Ahmet Akbıyık). Under Review.
   [Working Paper] [Pre-Analysis Plan]
3. The Accountability Dilemma: Experimental Evidence from Brazil’s Democratic Reckoning (with Fernando Bizzarro and Jean Vilbert). Under Review.
   [Working Paper] [Pre-Analysis Plan]
4. When Do Courts Constrain the Executive? Judicial Selection Institutions and Judicial Allies in Israel.
   [Working Paper]
5. The Trump Effect on Global Autocratization: Theory and Evidence from Israel and Turkey (with Evren Balta and Oded Haklai).
   [Working Paper]

At Harvard, I received 5.0 out of 5.0 evaluations from my students as a graduate-student instructor for a course on “Law and Inequality.” My teaching evaluations are available here. I was also nominated by my students for the Cheryl B. Welch Thesis Adviser Award and served as an honors thesis adviser or mentor for five Harvard undergraduates. As a 2025 Harvard Horizons Scholar, I received 60 hours of training from Harvard’s Bok Center for Teaching and Learning to communicate my research in a TED talk-style lecture. You can watch my Harvard Horizons lecture here.

This website is based on the Github minimal theme and is inspired by the websites of Shiro Kuriwaki and Chagai Weiss.