Our People

Sarah Anzia is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies American politics with a focus on state and local government, interest groups, political parties, and public policy. Her first book, Timing and Turnout: How Off-Cycle Elections Favor Organized Groups, examines how the timing of elections can be manipulated to affect both voter turnout and the composition of the electorate, which, in turn, affects election outcomes and public policy. She also studies the role of government employees and public-sector unions in elections and policymaking in the United States.

Terri Bimes is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Charles and Louis Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research specializes on the historical development of the presidency and presidential rhetoric. In her book project, she investigates the relationship between statebuidling and the use of populist rhetoric. Her previous publications have examined presidential rhetoric, divided government and presidential elections. In addition to teaching, Terri also runs the John Gardner Public Service Fellowship.

David Broockman is an Associate Professor of Political Science. He researches public opinion and political representation in the United States. His research has appeared in Science, the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and other outlets.

Professor Citrin teaches in the field of political behavior and his research interests include political trust, the foundations of policy preferences, direct democracy, national identity, and ethnic politics, including immigration and language politics. His work primarily concerns American politics but also Western Europe and Canada. Professor Citrin received his B.A. and M.A. from McGill University and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. He has taught here since 1970.

Among his books and edited volumes are American Identity and the Politics of Multiculturalism (2014), Public Opinion and Constitutional Controversy (2009), Tax Revolt, Something for Nothing in California (1982,1985), After the Tax Revolt: Proposition 13 Turns 30 (2009), and Nominating the President: Evolution and Revolution in 2008 and Beyond (2009). He is the author of numerous articles in leading journals as well as many book chapters, with some recent examples listed below.

Professor Citrin formerly was Director of the State Data Archive and Acting Director of the Survey Research Center at Berkeley. Since 2007 he has served as the Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies.

Professor Gailmard studies principal-agent problems in politics, such as delegation of authority and communication of policy expertise. He applies this perspective to better understand the structure and development of political institutions. His research in this area has focused on the strategic origins of American political institutions in the English colonial period; expertise and political responsiveness in the bureaucracy; historical development of the American executive branch; the internal organization of the U.S. Congress; and electoral accountability. He has also studied models of collective decision making in laboratory experiments.

Professor Gailmard is the author of Learning While Governing: Expertise and Accountability in the Executive Branch (with John W. Patty), which won the William H. Riker Prize (APSA political economy section) and Herbert A. Simon Prize (APSA public administration section), as well as Statistical Modeling and Inference for Social Science, a Ph.D.-level textbook. He has published research in leading social science journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics.

Rebecca Goldstein is an Assistant Professor of Law in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Her research interests include racial and ethnic politics, bureaucratic politics, and the politics of criminal justice policy. She received my Ph.D. from Harvard University’s Department of Government in 2019 and her B.A. in Statistics from Harvard College in 2013.

Professor Van Houweling studies political behavior and legislative institutions in the United States. Both aspects of his research are driven by an interest in better understanding the representational linkages between electorates and officeholders. He received his B.A. in political science from the University of Michigan in 1993 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2003. He worked as a Legislative Assistant to Senator Thomas A. Daschle of South Dakota from 1993 to 1995. He has published articles in a variety of political science journals, including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and Studies in American Political Development.

Professor Van Houweling is engaged in two large ongoing projects. The first project, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, examines how citizens respond to various characterisitics of candidates policy positions, including their content, consistency, and ambiguity. The second project examines how modern congressional majority parties employ legislative tactics to weaken representational constraints on their members. One unique aspect of this Congress-focused work is that it uses surveys and survey experiments to better understand how the electorate provides incentives for, and constraints upon, the procedural strategies legislators adopt.

Professor Jagmohan specializes in the history of African American and American political thought. His current research and teaching interests include the politics of deception, theories of property, slavery, and domination, and the ideas of nationalism and self-determination. At the moment he is completing his first book, Dark Virtues: Booker T. Washington’s Tragic Realism, which studies moral agency—including the use of deception—under conditions of extremity such as slavery and Jim Crow. He has also begun work on a second book: Slavery and Subversion: The Political Thought of Harriet Jacobs, which reads Jacobs as a moral and political theorist. So far, his research has been published in the Journal of Politics; Political Theory; NOMOS; Perspectives on Politics; Politics, Groups, and Identities; Contemporary Political Theory; and Boston Review.

Prior to arriving at Berkeley Professor Jagmohan was Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where he delivered the 2018 Constitution Day Lecture and was awarded the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Preceptorship in the University Center for Human Values. He was the winner of the APSA Best Dissertation Award from the Race, Ethnicity and Politics Section (2015) and was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University (2018). He holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Cornell University.

My research is broadly concerned with the effects of cognitive processes – including perception, attention, concept formation, and memory – on political behavior writ large. My primary research project investigates the ways in which the psychological and neural underpinnings of threat perception influence policy preferences, with a particular focus on national security decision-making.

I hold an AB from Harvard in Government, an MSc from LSE in Global Politics, and a PhD from MIT in Political Science. Prior to arriving at Berkeley, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT in SaxeLab.

Gabriel Lenz is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies democratic accountability, focusing on how to help voters hold their politicians accountable and how governments can protect people from violence and incarceration. He has published a book on elections with the University of Chicago Press and has published articles in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, and other journals.

Amy E. Lerman is Professor of Public Policy and Political Science, Co-Director of The Possibility Lab, and Associate Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research is focused on issues of race, public opinion, and political behavior, especially as they relate to punishment and social inequality in America. Lerman is the author of numerous books and journal articles, and her work has been featured in media outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, CNN and NPR. In addition to her academic scholarship, Lerman has served as a speechwriter and communications consultant for national nonprofits and members of the United States Congress, a community organizer in Latin America and Southeast Asia, and an adjunct faculty member of the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison. She consults widely on issues related to prison reform, access to higher education, and law enforcement mental health.

Dr. Cecilia Hyunjung Mo (Ph.D. Political Economics and M.A. Political Science from Stanford University; MPA in International Development from Harvard University) is an Associate Professor of Political Science. She is concerned with basic research on behavioral political economy and aspirations-based models of politics, and her applied work focuses on understanding and addressing important social problems related to democratic citizenship, immigration, inequality, and prejudice. Dr. Mo has significant experience with experimental methods, impact evaluations, quantitative methods, and survey methods. She is also the recipient of the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) 2015 Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award, APSA’s 2016 Best Paper Award on Political Behavior, and APSA’s 2018 Best Paper Award on Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior, as well as the 2018 Roberta Sigel Early Career Scholar Award from the International Society of Political Psychology and 2020 Emerging Scholar Award in the study of Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior from APSA.
Website: ceciliahmo.com

Paul Pierson is the John Gross Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley and Director of the Center for the Study of American Democracy. His research focuses on American political economy and public policy. He is the author or co-author of six books, including the best-selling Winner Take All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, co-authored by Jacob Hacker. Pierson is a regular commentator on public affairs, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, and Foreign Affairs. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Pierson is a former Guggenheim Fellow, Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, and Russell Sage Foundation Fellow. He also served as co-Director of the Successful Societies Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR).

Eric Schickler is Jeffrey & Ashley McDermott Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of three books which have won the Richard F. Fenno, Jr. Prize for the best book on legislative politics: Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress (2001), Filibuster: Obstruction and Lawmaking in the United States Senate (2006, with Gregory Wawro), and Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power (2016, with Douglas Kriner; also winner of the Richard E. Neustadt Prize for the best book on executive politics). His book, Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965, was the winner of the Woodrow Wilson Prize for the best book on government, politics or international affairs published in 2016, and is co-winner of the J. David Greenstone Prize for the best book in history and politics from the previous two calendar years. He is also the co-author of Partisan Hearts and Minds, which was published in 2002. He has authored or co-authored articles in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Comparative Political Studies, Polity, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Social Science History. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of American politics, the U.S. Congress, rational choice theory, American political development, and public opinion.

Laura Stoker is Professor of the Graduate School in the Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on the development and change of political attitudes and behavior and on topics at the intersection of research design and statistics. Stoker is the recipient of fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Oxford University, and the University of Manchester, and has served on the Board of the American National Election Studies (2000-2002, 2018-present), the British National Election Studies (2014-2016), and the CASBS Causal Inference for Social Impact Lab (2019-present).

Steven K. Vogel is Chair of the Political Economy Program, the Il Han New Professor of Asian Studies, and a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in the political economy of the advanced industrialized nations. He recently published “The Regulatory Roots of Inequality in America” (2021). He is also the author of Marketcraft: How Governments Make Markets Work (2018), Japan Remodeled: How Government and Industry Are Reforming Japanese Capitalism (2006), and Freer Markets, More Rules: Regulatory Reform in Advanced Industrial Countries (1996).