Benjamin Radcliff (born August 28, 1963) is an American political scientist and a professor at the University of Notre Dame. He is also affiliated with the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy and the Higgins Labor Studies Program. Best known for his work on the connections between politics and human happiness, his research also encompasses democratic theory, political economy, and the study of organized labor. Education and career Radcliff attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he obtained a B.A. in 1984. He graduated from there in 1991 with a Ph.D. in Political Science. While he has held faculty appointments at Rutgers University and Vanderbilt University, the majority of his academic career has been spent at the University of Notre Dame. He has been a fellow at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities and at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. In 2014 he was in residence as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar at the Roosevelt Study Center, in the Netherlands. Early research In a series of scholarly articles in the 1990s, Radcliff attempted a radical reinterpretation of the implications for democratic thought of social theory in general, and Arrow's impossibility theorem in particular. Rather than the familiar suggestion, associated most closely with the work of William H. Riker, that Arrow's work suggested that democracy must by logical necessity be limited to the minimal form associated with classical Liberalism, Radcliff argued that social choice theory actually supported more robust or populistic conceptions of democracy. This work culminated in a 2000 article in The Journal of Politics that sought to establish that the only democratic models to survive the challenges posed by social choice theory were in fact the radical interpretations of democracy known as participatory democracy or deliberative democracy. This article won the award for best article published in The Journal of Politics in that year. During this same period, Radcliff (sometimes in collaboration with his colleague Alexander Pacek of Texas A&M University) produced a series of empirical articles focusing, among other things, on the connections between organized labor, political participation, the welfare state, and electoral outcomes in the industrial democracies and across the American States. Current research Radcliff's recent work has focused on the social scientific study of happiness within the multi-disciplinary field sometimes labeled as happiness economics. In a 2001 article in the American Political Science Review he provided extensive econometric evidence in support