Carroll and Milton Professor Emeritus of Politics at New York University. Previously, he was a professor at the University of Chicago and held visiting positions in India, Chile, China, France, Germany, Spain and Switzerland.

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), the British Academy and the National Academy of Sciences, he is the recipient of the 1985 Socialist Review Book Prize, the 1998 Gregory M. Luebbert Article Prize, the 2001 Woodrow Wilson Prize, the 2010 Lawrence Longley Article Prize, the 2018 Sakip Sabanci International Prize and the 2018 Juan Linz Prize. In 2010, he also received the Johan Skytte Prize.

He has recently published Why Bother with Elections? (Polity Press 2018) and Crises of Democracy (Cambridge University Press 2019).