Daniel Carpenter is Allie S. Freed Professor of Government and Chair of the Department of Government in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Carpenter graduated from Georgetown University in 1989 with distinction in Honors Government and received his doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago in 1996. He taught previously at Princeton University (1995-1998) and the University of Michigan (1998-2002). He joined the Harvard University faculty in 2002.  Beginning July 2021, he will serve as Faculty Director of the Social Sciences at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, a position he also held from 2013 to 2020.

Professor Carpenter's research on petitioning appears in his book Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790-1870 (Harvard University Press, 2021), which was awarded the J. David Greenstone Prize of the American Political Science Association, the Seymour Martin Lipset Prize of the American Political Science Association and the James P. Hanlan Book Award of the New England Historical Association; "L’éruption patriote: The Revolt against Dalhousie and the Petitioning Explosion in Nineteenth-Century French Canada,” Social Science History (2019, with Doris Brossard); "Recruitment by Petition: American Antislavery, French Protestantism, English Suppression," Perspective on Politics (September 2016); "Paths of Recruitment: Rational Social Prospecting in Petition Canvassing," American Journal of Political Science (2018, with Clayton Nall and Benjamin Schneer), which was awarded the AJPS Best Article Award for 2018; “Party Emergence Through Petitions: The Whigs and the Bank War of 1832-34” Studies in American Political Development (October 2015, with Benjamin Schneer), and “When Canvassers Became Activists: Antislavery Petitioning and the Political Mobilization of American Women,” American Political Science Review (August 2014, with Colin D. Moore), which was awarded the Mary Parker Follett Prize of the American Political Science Association for best article in political history of 2014.

Professor Carpenter's previous scholarship on regulation and government organizations appears in Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA (Princeton, 2010), winner of the Allan Sharlin Memorial Award of the Social Science History Association; and of The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862-1928 (Princeton, 2001), winner of the Gladys Kammerer Prize of the American Political Science Association and the Charles Levine Prize of the International Political Science Association.  With David Moss of Harvard Business School, he is the author and co-editor of Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence in Regulation and How to Limit It (Cambridge, 2013).

He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Radcliffe Institute Fellow (2007-2008), and Fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2003-2004), as well as an elected fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.  His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Studies in American Political Development, Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Lancet, and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, among other venues.  His public writings have appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde, the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Washington Monthly and other outlets.