Eric Kaufmann is a Canadian-born political scientist whose work centers on ethnicity, nationalism, religion, and demography, and on how these forces shape the politics of Western democracies. Trained as a scholar of nationalism, he built his reputation studying the demographic dynamics of ethnic and religious groups, arguing that population trends—including differential birth rates and immigration—carry major political consequences that mainstream social science has been reluctant to confront. Much of his research examines how majority ethnic groups respond to becoming smaller shares of national populations, and he has argued that anxieties about this shift are a central, often underappreciated driver of contemporary populism.
His most influential intervention concerns what he frames as a coming transformation of majority-white societies through immigration and intermarriage. Kaufmann distinguishes between racism and what he calls a legitimate attachment of ethnic majorities to their group and its cultural presence, contending that liberal societies err when they treat all majority-group identity concern as illegitimate. He argues that suppressing open discussion of these attachments fuels resentment and strengthens the radical right, and he advocates instead for allowing majority interests to be voiced within a liberal framework. This has placed him among thinkers associated with debates over national identity, assimilation, and the limits of multiculturalism, and made him a frequent reference point in discussions on the intellectual right, though he presents his own stance as empirical and small-l liberal rather than nationalist.
More recently Kaufmann has become a prominent critic of what he describes as the spread of progressive cultural orthodoxy in universities and public institutions, warning that norms around identity and speech constrain open inquiry. He has written on political discrimination in academia and campaigned for institutional protections for viewpoint diversity. These arguments have made him a polarizing figure: admirers see him as breaking taboos around demography and cultural politics with data-driven analysis, while critics argue that his framing risks legitimizing ethnic majoritarianism and understating the harms of nativist mobilization.
Kaufmann's significance lies less in founding a school of thought than in reframing immigration, demography, and identity as questions that liberal democracies must engage openly rather than moralize away. His work has influenced conservative and heterodox commentators seeking a social-scientific vocabulary for majority grievances, and it sits at the contested intersection of demography, nationalism studies, and the culture-war debates of the 2010s and 2020s.