Alasdair Roberts

Alasdair Roberts is a professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He writes extensively on problems of governance, law and public policy. His latest book, The Adaptable Country: How Canada Can Survive the Twenty-First Century, was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in September 2024. His previous book, Superstates: Empires of the Twenty-First Century, was published by Polity in 2023. 

His other books include: Strategies for Governing (Cornell University Press, 2019), which won the ASPA SPAR book award; Can Government Do Anything Right? (Polity Books, 2018); Four Crises of American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2017); The End of Protest: How Free-Market Capitalism Learned to Control Dissent, (Cornell University Press, 2013); America’s First Great Depression (Cornell University Press, 2012); The Logic of Discipline: Global Capitalism and the Architecture of Government (Oxford University Press, 2010), which received an ASPA SPAR honorable mention; and The Collapse of Fortress Bush: The Crisis of Authority in American Government (New York University Press, 2008). Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age, published by Cambridge University Press in 2006, received the Brownlow Book Award from the US National Academy of Public Administration, and three other academic book awards. Professor Roberts has also won several awards for his journal articles.

Alasdair Roberts is a professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was the inaugural Director of the School of Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 2017 to 2022. During 2022-23, he was the Jocelyne Bourgon Visiting Scholar at the Canada School of Public Service. Professor Roberts has held tenured positions at Queen's University, Syracuse University, Suffolk University Law School, and the University of Missouri. He earned his BA from Queen's, JD from Toronto, and MPP and PhD in Public Policy from Harvard. He grew up in Pembroke, Ontario, Canada.

In 2007, Professor Roberts became the first non-US citizen to be elected as a Fellow of the US National Academy of Public Administration. In 2022, he received the Riggs Award for Lifetime Achievement in International and Comparative Public Administration. In 2014 he received the Grace-Pépin Access to Information Award for his research on open government. From 2009 to 2017, he was co-editor of the journal Governance. He serves on the editorial boards of several other journals in the field of public administration. He served on the Accreditation Board of the Canadian Association of Programs in Public Administration from 2022 to 2024.