Patrick Whelan is a theorist and educator whose work brings together political theory, social theory, and political psychology. His research asks how institutions enable or frustrate the development of independent capabilities and how legitimacy, recognition, and power shape that process. The current project develops a needs-based explanation of democratic decline. It reconstructs Maslow’s account of motivation through a Nietzschean lens of self-mastery and connects both to Giddens’s concept of ontological security in order to model human development as institutionalized capability expansion. The project then applies a needs-based discourse analysis to the United States (2015–2025) and the United Kingdom (2016–2025) to examine how appeals to belonging, esteem, and purpose structure contemporary rhetoric.
Patrick holds an MA in Political Theory from the University of Toronto and an MA in Public Administration (Population and Development) from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He has taught across secondary and higher-education settings, served in curriculum and school leadership roles, and earlier was an officer in the Canadian Forces. His monograph Human Development: A Re-education in Freedom, Love, and Happiness provides the conceptual groundwork for his proposed doctoral research program, The Politics of Insecurity.
Research interests include democratic theory, capability approach, legitimacy, recognition, power and agency, political psychology, and discourse analysis. He is currently preparing working papers and welcomes inquiries regarding supervision and collaboration.