About

Dara Z. Strolovitch is a Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Political Science at Yale University. Her research and teaching focus on political representation, social movements, and the intersecting politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality. She holds a B.A. in Political Science from Vassar College and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale. Prior to her current position, she taught at the University of Minnesota and Princeton University. Strolovitch is the author of 'Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics,' which examines how organizations representing marginalized groups advocate for their intersectionally marginalized constituents. Her second book, 'When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in America,' explores the relationship between episodic hardships and ongoing struggles faced by marginalized groups, analyzing the racial and gendered politics of credit, debt, and housing foreclosures. Her work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the American Political Science Association’s Gladys Kammerer Award, the Leon Epstein Award, and the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics section’s Best Book Award. Her research has been published in various academic journals and edited volumes, and she has co-edited the CQ Guide to Interest Groups and Lobbying. Supported by grants and fellowships from organizations such as the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Brookings Institution, her scholarly contributions have significantly advanced understanding of social justice advocacy, political representation, and intersectionality. She has served as co-editor of the American Political Science Review and is a founding Associate Editor of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. Additionally, she co-directs the Center for the Study of Inequality at Yale’s Institution for Social & Policy Studies.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Internet privacy
• Computer Security
• Demography
• Business
• Public economics
• Demographic economics
• World Wide Web
• Library science
• Actuarial science
• Psychology
• Economics
• Medicine
• Social psychology
• Mathematics
• History
• Nursing
• Environmental health

Selected publications

• Who Deserves Scarce Health and Education Resources? How Policy Context Shapes Target Group Deservingness

  Policy Studies Journal · 2025-12-03

  articleOpen access

  ABSTRACT The social construction of target populations (SCTP) framework emphasizes the ways in which target populations' levels of political power and deservingness shape the allocation of policy benefits, but less attention has been devoted to the conditions under which the same target population may be considered deserving in one policy context but undeserving in another. We argue that perceived deservingness and distributions of policy benefits to dependent groups are conditional on two components of policy context: (1) resource scarcity and (2) policy domain. We test our hypotheses in two nationally representative conjoint experiments during the COVID‐19 pandemic, focusing on people with disabilities (PWD), a significant and understudied marginalized group. We find that while respondents prioritized PWD when providing educational resources, they deprioritized PWD when allocating life‐saving medical resources. We also find that emotions toward PWD were important correlates of public preferences for allocating policy benefits. Together, our findings highlight the importance of resource scarcity, policy domain, and emotions in shaping deservingness perceptions and the allocation of scarce resources.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Organizational leaders and intersectional advocacy

  Politics Groups and Identities · 2024-09-23 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The<i>American Political Science Review</i>During the COVID-19 Pandemic

  PS Political Science & Politics · 2024-02-16 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  On June 1, 2020, a little more than two months after the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 pandemic declaration, our editorial team assumed the leadership of the American Political Science Review ( APSR ). Although this confluence of events makes it difficult to isolate the pandemic’s effect on new submissions and review processes, this article describes submission and review patterns in the two and a half years before and after the onset of the pandemic and the editorial transition. It describes our preliminary observations regarding what the patterns suggest about the pandemic’s impact on the APSR. 1

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Replication Data for: The American Political Science Review during the COVID-19 Pandemic

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-11-05 · 1 citations

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  On June 1, 2020, a little more than two months after the World Health Organization's pandemic declaration, we assumed leadership of the &lt;i&gt;American Political Science Review&lt;/i&gt; (&lt;i&gt;APSR&lt;/i&gt;), making it difficult to isolate the pandemic's effect on new submissions and review processes. In this research note, we describe submission and review patterns in the two and half years before and after the pandemic's beginning and editorial transition. We offer some tentative conclusions. The timing of the editorial transition and our public commitments to broaden the reach of the journal may help explain why new submissions to the &lt;i&gt;APSR&lt;/i&gt; increased during the the pandemic. At the &lt;i&gt;APSR&lt;/i&gt;, our commitment to &lt;i&gt;substantive&lt;/i&gt; diversity may have also contributed to greater &lt;i&gt;representational&lt;/i&gt; diversity among submitting authors. In our experience, reviewers were less likely to complete reviews during the first years of the pandemic, but by inviting more reviewers per manuscript, our team was able to improve review times overall. This strategy may not work as well for smaller journals that already struggle to secure reviews.

  PublisherDOI

• Identifying And Exploring Bias In Public Opinion On Scarce Resource Allocation During The COVID-19 Pandemic

  Health Affairs · 2022 · 5 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Psychology

  The COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to examine public opinion regarding the allocation of scarce medical resources. In this conjoint experiment on a nationally representative sample of US adults, we examined how a range of patient characteristics affect respondents' willingness to allocate a ventilator between two patients with equal likelihood of short-term survival and how this differs by respondents' attributes. Respondents were 5.5 percentage points less likely to allocate a ventilator to a patient with a disability than to a nondisabled patient. Disability bias was correlated with older age cohorts and higher education levels of respondents. Liberal and moderate respondents were more likely to give a ventilator to Black and Asian patients than to White patients. Conservatives were much less likely to allocate a ventilator to transgender patients than to cisgender patients. These findings demonstrate the importance of bias mitigation and civil rights enforcement in health policy making, especially under conditions of scarcity.

  PublisherDOI

• When Does a Crisis Begin?

  University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc. eBooks · 2021-08-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People

  2021 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Computer Security
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• 3. When Does a Crisis Begin? Race, Gender, and the Subprime Noncrisis of the Late 1990s

  University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks · 2021-12-31 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Editors’ Introduction: Mentoring and Marginalization

  PS Political Science & Politics · 2020 · 9 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Recognition and resistance: the sober optimism of Phil Ayoub's <i>When States Come Out</i>

  Politics Groups and Identities · 2019-04-03

  article1st authorCorresponding

  "Recognition and resistance: the sober optimism of Phil Ayoub's When States Come Out." Politics, Groups, and Identities, 7(2), pp. 456–457

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Steven Smith

  18 shared

• Melissa Jane Hardie

  16 shared

• Annamarie Jagose

  Washington University in St. Louis

  16 shared

• Patty Ingham

  Washington University in St. Louis

  16 shared

• Linda Charnes

  Washington University in St. Louis

  16 shared

• R.E. Adams

  ETH Zurich

  16 shared

• Mel Micir

  University of California, Irvine

  16 shared

• Ann Cvetkovich

  16 shared

Awards & honors

• American Political Science Association’s Gladys Kammerer Awa…
• Leon Epstein Award for the best book on Political Organizati…
• American Sociological Association’s Race, Gender, and Class…
• Virginia Hodgkinson Prize from the Association for Research…
• Award for the Best Book on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics fro…