Justin de Benedictis-Kessner
Justin de Benedictis-Kessner is a political scientist whose work examines the often-messy relationship between cities, government, and the people those governments are supposed to serve.
He is the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, where he studies urban politics and policy, particularly the ways politics shapes—and is shaped by—housing, transportation, policing, economic development, and other services largely governed at the local level. He also leads the Local Politics Lab and teaches an applied urban-policy field lab that pairs students with cities and towns to work on real-world problems.
A central question in de Benedictis-Kessner’s research is accountability. Local governments make decisions that people experience constantly: whether the street gets repaired, the bus arrives, housing gets built, or a neighborhood feels cared for. Yet responsibility for those outcomes can be spread across overlapping agencies, jurisdictions, elected officials, contractors, and other institutions, making it surprisingly difficult for residents to know who is actually responsible—or whom to hold accountable.
His 2026 book, The Fog of Accountability: How Institutions Keep Voters from Holding Their Local Governments Accountable, argues that this confusion isn't simply the result of disengaged voters. Weak competition in local elections, complicated institutions, limited local media coverage, and strategic finger-pointing can make responsibility genuinely difficult to see. His research includes case studies of services as tangible as road repair in Oakland and public transit in Boston.
The work turns a familiar idea about cities on its head: local government may be closest to us physically while remaining remarkably difficult to see clearly.
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