About

Theda Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. She earned her BA from Michigan State University in 1969 and her PhD from Harvard University in 1975. Skocpol began her academic career in Harvard's Sociology Department before holding faculty positions in Sociology and Political Science at The University of Chicago. She returned to Harvard in 1986, where she has held various professorships, including her current named chair since 1998. Throughout her career, she has served in leadership roles such as President of the Social Science History Association and the American Political Science Association, as well as directing Harvard's Center for American Political Studies and serving as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Skocpol is a highly influential scholar in the social sciences, recognized for her contributions to comparative politics, American politics, historical sociology, U.S. history, and public policy studies. Her research has focused on the significance of the state in revolutions, welfare, and political trust, combining theoretical depth with empirical evidence. She is the author of twelve books and numerous articles, with her first book, "States and Social Revolutions," winning multiple awards. Her work has shaped historical-institutional and comparative research, and since the 1990s, she has concentrated on U.S. politics from historical and comparative perspectives. In addition to her academic achievements, Skocpol is active in civic engagement. She co-founded and directs the Scholars Strategy Network, which promotes nonpartisan public engagement by university scholars to improve public policy and strengthen democracy. She has been elected to prestigious honor societies including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences, and has received numerous honorary degrees and fellowships. In 2007, she was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, one of the field's most prestigious honors, recognizing her visionary analysis of the state's role in political and social transformations.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Law
• Virology
• Political economy
• Public administration

Selected publications

• Theda Skocpol in Conversation with Edwin Amenta on Sociology, Political Science, Higher Education, and U.S. Politics

  Sociologica · 2025-12-22

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In this interview, Theda Skocpol discusses with her former student Edwin Amenta issues ranging from the academic, to the political, and to the personal. A highly renowned and decorated scholar, Skocpol addresses her shift from being a broadly comparative scholar, with her path-breaking initial work on comparative revolutions, to focusing her scholarly attention on politics and policy in the United States. She argues that it was not as big a leap as it might seem. She also discusses her institutional shift from sociology to political science, but indicates that this move was not an intellectual turn from sociology and notes that she could never have had the career she has had without first gaining a PhD in sociology. Skocpol shares her views on the current crisis in U.S. higher education in part from her perspective of having been dean of Harvard University’s Graduate School. She also discusses her Madison Lecture from just before the 2024 election that returned Donald Trump to the White House, including her prescient predictions of his authoritarian moves, as well as what was unexpected. In the process, she situates the administration’s moves away from democracy and identifies it as a kind of lawless patrimonialism. Based on her wide-ranging research, she suggests strategies for the U.S. Democratic Party to regain power. This interview took place on the morning of November 4, 2025, Election Day in the United States.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Rising Threats to U.S. Democracy

  PS Political Science & Politics · 2025-01-15 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This is the expanded written version of the James Madison Lecture delivered on September 6, 2024, at the APSA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, PA. I grapple with the pressing question before us as social scientists and as citizens: How and why have US politics and governance arrived at the present juncture where long-standing constitutional practices and democratically responsive governance are very much at stake? My answer focuses on what I see as the prime driver of the current crisis: the recent radicalization of the Republican Party and its allies, as they have pursued two forms and phases of antidemocratic politics. The first version involves maximum use of legal hardball steps that stretch existing laws and rules to disadvantage partisan opponents (I also call this approach “McConnellism” in honor of its chief practitioner, outgoing GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky). The second approach targets political competitors and government operations with extralegal harassment, threats of violence, and even actual violence. Drawing on my own research with many collaborators, as well as from many excellent studies by colleagues in political science and beyond, I will dissect the elite and popular roots of recent Republican embrace of both forms of antidemocratic politics.

  PublisherDOI

• America's Incomplete Welfare State: The Limits of New Deal Reforms and the Origins of the Present Crisis

  2024-10-11 · 4 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  During the last two decades, the social policies of the U.S. government have been the focus of heated political controversies that have gone well beyond mere tinkering with the terms of the 1935 Social Security Act, the charter legislation for America’s social insurance and public assistance programs. As the rhetoric of the 1984 election made clear, those controversies are far from over. Debates about the rising costs of old-age insurance and medical coverage, the adequacy of welfare “safety nets,” and the basic legitimacy of national public efforts to cope with poverty, unemployment, and social dependency promise to be with us for some time to come. The United States is unmistakably in the midst of a watershed period for its public social policies.

  PublisherDOI

• Reflections on an anniversary

  Politics · 2024-06-23 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  My first book, in many ways a lonely project at the time, is now part of a steadily growing body of comparative-historical scholarship in the social sciences. Studying socio-political changes of all kinds – including today’s democratic backsliding in the United States and beyond – is best done, as States and Social Revolutions helped to demonstrate, by probing and juxtaposing fully contextualised cases. It still makes sense for scholars to (directly or implicitly) compare historical trajectories, tease out the intersections of social inequalities and struggles over state power, and address the evolving global contexts as in local, regional, or national episodes play out. This way of studying political conflict and change is what I believe endures from States and Social Revolutions, as new generations of scholars go far beyond the arguments of that book born decades ago.

  PublisherDOI

• The Rise, Fall, and Influence of the Tea Party Insurgency. By Patrick Rafail and John D. McCarthy. Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024. 250p. $105.00 cloth, $34.99 paper.

  Perspectives on Politics · 2024-10-04

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The Rise, Fall, and Influence of the Tea Party Insurgency. By Patrick Rafail and John D. McCarthy. Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024. 250p. 34.99 paper. - Volume 23 Issue 1

  PublisherDOI

• Mars Unshackled:

  2023-11-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Immigration Clashes, Party Polarization, and Republican Radicalization: Tracking Shifts in State and National Party Platforms since 1980

  Studies in American Political Development · 2023-09-27 · 7 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Studies of U.S. politics increasingly aim to make sense of two key trends: party polarization and Republican Party radicalization. Surprisingly, however, party divergences on immigration have been largely overlooked. Drawing on state and national political party platforms since 1980, we document the rise of attention to immigration, the polarization of substantive party positions, and the sharp GOP turn toward restrictive measures. After pinpointing the timing and relative trajectories of national and state-level agenda shifts, we explore potential drivers and establish two sets of flashpoint events worth further study: highly visible and mostly deadlocked congressional battles over immigration grand bargains, and bottom-up reverberations from the widespread 2006 immigrant rights protests and post-2008 Tea Party organizing. We find that grassroots Tea Party efforts were intervening accelerators rather than original causes of the Republican embrace of tough immigration restrictions. The article concludes by stressing the chronological layering of successive party polarizations—from 1960s divergences around civil rights, through clashes about abortion and LGBTQ rights from the late 1970s to the 1990s, and followed by immigration polarization in the 2000s. This process of layering polarizations on top of one another may have supercharged recent GOP turns toward ethnonationalism and tolerance for threats of violence.

  PublisherDOI

• Social Justice Campaigns and Democratic Party Gains: How Georgia's Partisan Reformers Overtook North Carolina's Moral Advocates

  Studies in American Political Development · 2022-06-30 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract How did Democrats running for federal office win in Georgia in 2020–21, but not in North Carolina, a state long regarded as more “flippable”? This article uses newly assembled organizational data to situate recent Democratic fortunes in the context of two long-running statewide campaigns for racial and economic justice—led by North Carolina's Reverend William Barber II and Georgia's Stacey Abrams. We track shifting political opportunity structures and the organizational and strategic evolution of both movements during the 2010s, with a special focus on outreach beyond major metropolitan areas. Our findings suggest that social justice campaigns aiming to increase government responsiveness to poor minority citizens do better if they engage in persistent, locally embedded voter outreach along partisan lines rather than heavily relying on morally framed, media-friendly protests. This research also demonstrates how data on organizational networks can be assembled and used to explore historical-institutional hypotheses about the development and impact of social movements.

  PublisherDOI

• Institutional Capacities, Partisan Divisions, and Federal Tensions in U.S. Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic

  RSF The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences · 2022 · 30 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  The COVID-19 pandemic struck during a period of extreme polarization in American politics. Unsurprisingly, responses to it quickly became politicized despite increasingly clear findings from scientific and public health communities about the most effective approaches for limiting its spread. We ask how the politicization affected pandemic response at the state level. We document and explain several kinds of state-level actions, beginning with 2020 variations in collecting and publishing COVID-related data and early mitigation strategies. We find that state capacity explains the former and partisanship the latter. We show that divisions within the Republican Party also meaningfully affected state responses. Inter- and intraparty divisions—rather than geography or severity of COVID—in fact continue to influence state policy following the inauguration of President Joe Biden, the availability of vaccines, and the rise of the Delta variant. These findings document that U.S. federalism often created obstacles to effective governmental responses.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Citizen Organizing and Partisan Polarization from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021-11-20 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The November 2020 elections delivered a big victory for Democratic presidential challenger Joseph R. Biden along with gains or holds for many Republicans running in congressional and state contests. Reinforced partisan divisions were not, however, the most remarkable aspect of this election. Amid a raging deadly pandemic and sharp economic retraction, about two-thirds of eligible Americans registered their votes by mail or in-person, marking the highest eligible voter turnout in more than a hundred years. Some 74 million voted for Donald Trump, while more than 81 million supported the winner, Joe Biden. This remarkably high voter turnout continued through the early January 2021 Georgia runoffs, where upset victories for Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock delivered control of the US Senate to their party through 2022. A modern US electoral system that has, for decades, exhibited extraordinary slack in voter participation suddenly experienced engaged citizens on both ends of the partisan spectrum, as many more Americans than the usual ideologically attuned elites, interest groups, and party-oriented activists, jumped into a high-stakes, emotionally and morally infused referendum on the meaning and future of US democracy.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jack Snyder

  Columbia University

  54 shared

• Atul Kohli

  48 shared

• Michael W. Doyle

  48 shared

• Kenneth A. Oye

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  47 shared

• Nancy Bermeo

  47 shared

• John Lewis Gaddis

  47 shared

• Richard Challener

  47 shared

• Henry Bienen

  47 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Political Science

  Harvard University

  1978

• B.A., Political Science

  University of California, Berkeley

  1973

Awards & honors

• Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science (2007)