Daniel Wodak, an associate professor of philosophy in the School of Arts & Sciences and an assistant professor of law in the Carey Law School, is the 2023 recipient of the Marc Sanders Foundation’s Political Philosophy Prize.

Dr. Wodak won the essay competition for his paper, “One Person, One Vote,” in which he argues that, despite the slogan’s ubiquity, there exists little consensus about what it means—or even a healthy debate among the competing definitions that people use.

Dr. Wodak’s goal in his prize-winning paper, he writes, is “to convince you that an urgent problem in democratic theory is to determine what it should mean to have ‘an equal say’ or ‘an equal vote.’”

The prize committee wrote that Dr. Wodak’s paper about the slogan is a “defensible account of the requirement [that] … pushes us toward radical conclusions, such as the possibility that all district-based voting systems including those used in the U.S. House of Representatives, Senate, and Electoral College, violate this minimal demand of political equality.”

The award for the competition is $5,000 and the essay will be published in Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy.

Dr. Wodak’s work broadly encompasses moral, legal, social, and political philosophy. He also won the Marc Sanders Prize for Metaethics in 2019, the same year he joined the Penn faculty.