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 Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. My research studies law and courts, democratic backsliding, and Middle East politics, with a focus on Israel and Turkey.

My research has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nexus, The Journal of Democracy, and The Middle East Journal. 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, Lawfare, The Washington Post, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

My work has been cited 850+ times on Google Scholar, in The New York Times (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and BBC News, and before the U.S. Supreme Court. My research has been awarded grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, Stanford University, and Harvard Law School. My job market paper, available here, won two Best Paper Awards from the American Political Science Association.

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. How Courts Undermine Democracy. The Journal of Democracy. 2026.
   [PDF]
2. The Trump Effect on Global Autocratization: Theory and Evidence from Israel and Türkiye (with Evren Balta and Oded Haklai). The Middle East Journal. 2026.
   [PDF]
3. 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]
4. 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. When Do Courts Constrain the Executive? Judicial Selection Institutions and Judicial Allies in Israel.
   [Working Paper]
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. How Incumbents Survive Economic Crises: Evidence from Turkey (with Ahmet Akbıyık). Under Review.
   [Working Paper] [Pre-Analysis Plan]
5. How Judicial Allies Protect the Rule of Law. Under Review.
   

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.