Postdoctoral Associate – Rethinking the Anti-Corruption Toolkit 2026-2027

ISPS External Fellow Professor Samuel Bagg (University of South Carolina) is seeking a postdoctoral research associate for a two-year full-time appointment starting Fall 2026 or as soon as possible thereafter (i.e. start date is flexible). The purpose of the role is to help develop a non-partisan collaborative public scholarship project: Rethinking the Anti-Corruption Toolkit. The second year of this appointment is conditional based on performance and resources.

The project is funded by and affiliated with the Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) through its Democratic Innovations program. However it is physically headquartered at the University of South Carolina under the direction of Prof. Bagg. The holder of the postdoctoral position will thus be hired and paid by Yale but will be expected to relocate to Columbia SC for the duration of the position.

The key aim of the project is to rethink and expand the range of institutional models we consider in our attempts to keep public institutions accountable to the public aims they are meant to serve. (See this writeup of an initial conference on this theme as well as the extended project description below).

More concretely the postdoctoral associate would assist Prof. Bagg in the following tasks over the course of the two-year position: (a) building and managing a team of collaborators and contributors from a wide range of scholarly disciplines and organizational contexts; (b) building and maintaining a large database of non-traditional or underutilized institutional models drawing on multi-disciplinary sources across history anthropology organizations design law business etc.; (c) producing an interactive web-based platform to enable open-ended exploration of that database; (d) collaborating on a series of scholarly articles that utilize and publicize the research collected in this database; (e) producing a suite of targeted materials aimed at policymakers and organizational leaders in specific contexts; and (f) planning a series of scholarly convenings to assist with the addition the postdoctoral associate would also have substantial scope to pursue independent scholarly projects with guidance from Prof. Bagg and other USC faculty. There is no teaching associated with the position.

Project Description Rethinking the Anti-Corruption Toolkit

How can we ensure public institutions serve the collective aims they are meant to pursue instead of being captured or co-opted by those entrusted with running them In addressing this eternal question contemporary institutional designers consider a strikingly narrow range of familiar governance models: e.g. elections to enable accountability; consultations to promote public input; procedural safeguards and meritocratic standards to ensure impartiality. And despite the real virtues of these tools near-exclusive reliance on them has stifled our institutional imaginationnot only in the design of government institutions but also in the governance of corporations unions parties foundations churches and beyond which also typically rely on the same familiar toolkit.

This project is a non-partisan effort to expand our institutional imagination by drawing on a far wider range of sources than is normally consideredprobing historical cultural and organizational diversity for promising but neglected models within the vast repository of tools our species has developed. A motivating example here is random selection (or sortition) a key tool for protecting public power for millennia that has only recently been rediscovered (and remains vastly underutilized). Still sortition is just the beginning. For instance one insight from the initial conference on this theme (held at Yale in May 2025) was that the practice of FTC filings shares key features of elite accountability mechanisms in ancient Rome and medieval Florence which could be generalized to other contemporary contexts. As the interdisciplinary participants at this event affirmed there remains a great deal of design space yet to be explored and a public resource that does so in an accessible way could be of great value to a wide range of scholars and practitioners. This project aims to deepen our knowledge about institutional alternatives and to share what we learn broadly.

The position is open to those who have recently completed their Ph.D. (in the last 6 years) in a related field or expect to complete it by Fall 2026. Salary is negotiable depending on qualifications.