Ian Shapiro is Sterling Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs at Yale University. He has written widely and influentially on democracy, justice, and the methods of social inquiry. A native of South Africa, he received his J.D. from the Yale Law School and his Ph.D. from the Yale Political Science Department where he has taught since 1984 and served as chair from 1999 to 2004. Shapiro served as Director of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies from 2004-2019. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. he is a past fellow of the Carnegie Corporation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Cape Town, Keio University in Tokyo, Nuffield College, Oxford, Sciences Po in Paris, and the London School of Economics. His most recent books are Uncommon Sense (Yale University Press, 2024) and After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy, How Politicians Broke our World (Basic Books, 2026). His current research concerns the relations between democracy and the distribution of income, wealth, and risk.