Affiliation: University of Bucharest
Keywords: Political Theory, Ethics of Voting, Electoral Policies, Democratic Theory, Democratic Resilience, Theories of Justice, Public Policy Analysis
Full profile: Alexandru Volacu is an Associate Professor at the University of Bucharest. Primarily based at the Faculty of Business and Administration, he teaches a range of classes on governance, public policies, critical thinking, and academic ethics in four different departments of the university.
He has a PhD in Political Science, completed at SNSPA, in Bucharest (with one term as a Visiting Doctoral Student at the University of Oxford), and his main field of expertise is that of political theory, being interested in several topics such as electoral policies, the ethics of voting, democratic theory, democratic resilience, digital democracy, theories of justice, and the methodology of political theory.
He is currently a part of the Horizon Europe-funded PERYCLES Consortium (Participatory Democracy that Scales), and is a member of the Justice Everywhere cooperative of political theorists, a member of the ECPR Research Network on the Political Theory of Elections, and a member of the International Advisory Board at Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. He previously held postdoctoral positions at the University of Bucharest and New Europe College, has been part of the H2020-funded REDEM Consortium (Reconstructing Democracy in Times of Crisis) and has been the director of several nationally funded research grants on electoral policies.
At the end of the 2025 he received the “Mircea Florian” Award of the Romanian Academy for his book, titled “Limits of the Electorate: Who Should Be Able to Vote in a Democracy?”, and
the Senate of the University of Bucharest Award for Most Prestigious Article of 2025, for the paper “Free-riding and Compulsory Voting” (published in the Journal of Politics).