William A. Galston writes the weekly Politics & Ideas column in the Wall Street Journal. He holds the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program, where he serves as a senior fellow. Before joining Brookings in January 2006, he was Saul Stern Professor and Acting Dean at the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, founding director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), and executive director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal. A participant in six presidential campaigns, he served from 1993 to 1995 as Deputy Assistant to President Clinton for Domestic Policy.

Mr. Galston is the author of 10 books and more than 100 articles in the fields of political theory, public policy, and American politics. His most recent books are The Practice of Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge, 2004), Public Matters (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), and Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy (Yale, 2018). A winner of the American Political Science Association’s Hubert H. Humphrey Award, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.