Dr. John Samples teaches Constitutional Interpretation for the Capital Semester program at TFAS. He directs the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute and has written extensively on campaign finance regulation. His book, “The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform,” was published by the University of Chicago Press in the fall of 2006. He has edited three books for the Cato Institute, including “Welfare for Politicians: Taxpayer Financing of Campaigns” (2005). Samples co-directed the Brookings-Cato project on the decline of electoral competition, which led to a volume he co-edited entitled “The Marketplace of Democracy” (2006). He has taught courses on public opinion and on money in politics at the Johns Hopkins University.
Samples previously served as director of Georgetown University Press and, prior to that, as vice president of the Twentieth Century Fund. He has published scholarly articles in Society, History of Political Thought and Telos, along with numerous contributions to edited volumes. Samples has also been featured in publications like USA Today, The New York Times and Los Angeles Times. He has appeared on NPR, Fox News Channel and MSNBC. Samples received his Ph.D. in political science from Rutgers University.