Biography

Natasha Piano is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UCLA, where she works on democratic theory, the history of political thought, and the intellectual history of political science. Her research focuses especially on traditions of political realism and political economy and their implications for democratic theory. Her first monograph, Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science (Harvard University Press, 2025), examines how American political science was shaped by a consequential misreading of the Italian elite theorists Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels. She is also co-editor of Florentine Political Writings from Petrarch to Machiavelli (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), for which she translated the political writings of Francesco Guicciardini. Her current book project turns to Joseph Schumpeter and the relationship between economic competition and democratic legitimacy.