Steven Teles is a political scientist focused on the intersection of political economy, public policy, political parties and ideology.

Teles’ recent writings focus on minoritarianism and its impact on democracy, the abundance movement, political economy, the political economy of housing construction and the need for greater ideological diversity in higher education.  

Teles is the author of Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites (Oxford, 2020); The Captured Economy: How The Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth and Increase Inequality (With Brink Lindsey, Oxford 2017); Prison Break: Why Conservatives Turned Against Mass Incarceration (With David Dagan, Oxford 2016), The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton, 2008) and Whose Welfare: AFDC and Elite Politics (Kansas, 1996). He is also editor of Conservatism and American Political Development (With Brian Glenn, Oxford, 2009) and Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy: Comparing the US and UK (with Glenn Loury and Tariq Modood, Cambridge, 2005). He has published widely in more popular outlets, from Democracy Journal, The Nation, The Atlantic, The New York Times and The American Prospect, to National Affairs, The Public Interest, The Economist and National Review.  He is currently at work on a book, under contract with Princeton University Press, entitled Varieties of Abundance, based on his widely read essay with the Niskanen Center, where he is a Senior Fellow. 

Teles earned his Ph.D. in government and foreign affairs from the University of Virginia in 1995 and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Yale University’s Center for American Political Studies and Princeton University. He earned his B.A. in political science from George Washington University in 1989.