About

Jacob S. Hacker is the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale University, where he also serves as Co-Director of the Ludwig Program in Public Sector Leadership at Yale Law School and is a resident fellow of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. An expert on American politics and policy, he has authored or co-authored more than a half-dozen books, numerous journal articles, and a wide range of popular writings. His notable works include 'The Divided Welfare State,' which received the Aaron Wildavsky Enduring Contribution Award from the American Political Science Association, and 'Let Them Eat Tweets,' co-authored with Paul Pierson. Hacker's research focuses on health policy, particularly his development of the concept of 'public option,' and on the shaping of markets to address inequality through 'predistribution.' He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, received the Robert Ball Award of the National Academy of Social Science in 2020, and was inducted into the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2021. Additionally, he is a founding director of the Consortium on American Political Economy and co-chairs the American Political Economy section of the American Political Science Association. His recent scholarly activities include serving as a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Sciences Po Center in Paris and holding the Kluge Chair in American Law and Governance at the U.S. Library of Congress.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Political economy
• Law
• Market economy
• Sociology
• Demographic economics
• Finance
• Economic system
• Economic growth
• Econometrics
• Public economics
• Development economics
• Economy

Selected publications

• America’s New Racial Battle Lines. By Rogers M. Smith and Desmond King. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2024. 392p.

  Perspectives on Politics · 2025-02-25

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Race, Responsiveness, and Representation in U.S. Lawmaking

  American Political Science Review · 2025-11-12

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Is national policy more responsive to the preferences of white Americans than to those of people of color? To answer this fundamental question, we examine how well federal lawmaking reflects the preferences of 520,000 Black, Latino, Asian American, and white citizens from 2006 to 2022. Average racial gaps in responsiveness are small regardless of issue area. However, white voters are significantly advantaged when Republicans control the government. Respondents’ class, age, and ideology cannot explain this disparity. Respondents’ partisanship explains some, but not all, of it. To further investigate, we analyze roll call votes in Congress, focusing on the Senate—the pivotal lawmaking institution. Similar patterns emerge: Republican Senators better represent white (versus Black or Latino) constituents. Moreover, Black-white disparities are larger in states where Black Americans comprise more of the population. This suggests a role for white racial attitudes, and, indeed, we find that state-level white racial resentment predicts Black-white representational disparities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How Not to Think About "Managed Care"

  University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The claim of this Article is that the concept of "managed care," like many concepts now prominent in commentary about medical care finance and delivery in the United States, is incoherent and thus a barrier to useful analysis. To demonstrate this conclusion, we first discuss the managerial context in which managed care claims have arisen and outline the diverse trends to which the category is regularly and confusingly applied. We then suggest an alternative approach to characterizing recent changes in medical care and show how this approach alters and deepens our understanding of recent economic and political developments. We conclude by arguing for more neutral categories to make sense of past and projected developments in methods of reimbursement, techniques of management, and organizational structures.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Arnold, R. Douglas. Fixing Social Security: The Politics of Reform in a Polarized Age

  Congress & the Presidency · 2024-01-02

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: "Bridging the Blue Divide: The Democrats' New Metro Coalition and the Unexpected Prominence of Redistribution"

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-11-08 · 1 citations

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The electoral base of the Democratic Party has been transformed over the past generation. Democrats have lost ground in rural America while adding strength in cities and, more recently, suburbs. A major consequence of this shift has been the creation of a “U-shaped” Democratic voting base, with both poorer metro voters and affluent suburbanites siding with the party. This spatial alliance overlays a multiracial one, as Democrats rely more heavily on minority voters than any other major party in American history. Many analysts have argued that the Democratic Party has managed this sea change by shifting from economic to cultural and identity appeals. This claim is consistent with leading models of two-dimensional party competition, as well as a fair amount of cross-national research on parties of the left and center-left in contemporary knowledge economies. However, we find little evidence for this claim in national Democrats’ messaging (via party platforms and on Twitter), nor, more important, in their actual policy efforts. Instead, we show that even as Democrats have increasingly relied on affluent, educated voters, the party has embraced a more ambitious economic agenda. The national party has bridged the Blue Divide not by foreswearing redistribution or foregrounding cultural liberalism, but by formulating an increasingly bold economic program—albeit one that elides important inequalities within its metro-based multi-racial coalition. Understanding how and why Democrats have taken this path is central to understanding not just the party’s response to its shifting electorate, but the way parties manage coalitional change more broadly.

  PublisherDOI

• Why So Little Sectionalism in the Contemporary United States?

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-12-07 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Like many nations, the United States is undergoing a revolution in economic and political geography. The shift from an industrial to a knowledge economy is feeding both political polarization and economic polarization. Scholars of American political development have long stressed that the United States’ diverse economic geography and strongly territorialized institutions encourage sectional policy conflict. Prominent scholars of contemporary politics have similarly argued that territorially based representation encourages policy responsiveness to local communities. We argue to the contrary that several key mediating factors – the increasing antiurban and status quo bias of American political institutions, the nationalization of US party coalitions, and the path-dependent character of inherited policy regimes – have greatly weakened the representation of place-based economic interests (PBEIs) in contemporary American politics. Indeed, because of these “filters,” each of the nation’s two major party coalitions manifests what we call a “PBEI paradox,” a set of policy commitments starkly at odds with the underlying economic needs of the areas that vote for it.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Bridging the Blue Divide: The Democrats’ New Metro Coalition and the Unexpected Prominence of Redistribution

  Perspectives on Politics · 2023-12-27 · 12 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The electoral base of the Democratic Party has been transformed over the past generation. Democrats have lost ground in rural America while adding strength in cities and, more recently, suburbs. A major consequence of this shift has been the creation of a “U-shaped” Democratic voting base, with both poorer metro voters and affluent suburbanites siding with the party. This spatial alliance overlays a multi-racial one, as Democrats rely more heavily on voters of color than any other major party in American history. Many analysts have argued that the Democratic Party has managed this sea change by shifting from economic to cultural and identity appeals. This claim is consistent with leading models of two-dimensional party competition, as well as a fair amount of cross-national research on parties of the left and center-left in contemporary knowledge economies. However, we find little evidence for this claim in national Democrats’ messaging (via party platforms and on Twitter), nor, more important, in their actual policy efforts. Instead, we show that even as Democrats have increasingly relied on affluent, educated voters, the party has embraced a more ambitious economic agenda. The national party has bridged the Blue Divide not by foreswearing redistribution or foregrounding cultural liberalism, but by formulating an increasingly bold economic program—albeit one that elides important inequalities within its metro-based multi-racial coalition. Understanding how and why Democrats have taken this path is central to understanding not just the party’s response to its shifting electorate, but the way parties manage coalitional change more broadly.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• <i>For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America</i> by Jonathan D. Cohen

  The Journal of Interdisciplinary History · 2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Do you feel lucky? When Clint Eastwood asked this question on the big screen, a string of cash-strapped states were asking it of their residents, establishing the first publicly run lotteries in the United States in more than a century. Deindustrializing Northeastern states were under budgetary siege, caught between tax-resistant electorates and their own declining fortunes. They were fighting the mob and wanted to corner its winnings as well as its bosses. And they had ready customers; working-class Catholics fleeing to the suburbs were as eager to play the lottery as the Black urbanites they left behind. The states that pioneered this new wave of government gambling—New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts—were feeling lucky. Lotteries would make their day.They did not. Despite the many innovations to come—scratch-off tickets, growing jackpots, multi-state mega-prizes—lotteries did not rescue Northeastern states from tough choices in the 1970s, make up for property tax revolts in the West in the 1980s, or allow Southern states to revitalize cash-starved education systems in the 1990s. But they did become the biggest government-run business in the United States, with a staggering $45 billion revenue in 2020, surpassing even the profits of cigarettes or smartphones. In a society marked by growing inequality and insecurity, the product that lotteries offered was an increasingly improbable chance of increasingly astronomical riches.This little-known story is an ideal subject for interdisciplinary history, and Cohen seizes the opportunity. His slim book is deeply researched yet eminently readable, and it draws on political science, behavioral economics, public finance, cultural studies, and good old-fashioned political economy. Cohen is as comfortable citing Kahneman as he is Cowie, exploring popular images of wealth as trenchantly as he explicates religious ideals. He has also mined a remarkable number of archives. The only dimension that seems to be missing is the cross-national one; I could not help but wonder whether America’s lottery obsession is unique within the advanced industrial world and, if so, why.Cohen’s book has a straightforward structure, dividing the rise of state lotteries into three phases: their 1970s arrival, 1980s Western consolidation, and 1990s Southern expansion. For each, he pairs an archivally grounded history with a nuanced analysis of associated cultural and economic developments.Three sophisticated interdisciplinary claims are embedded in this simple approach. The first is that state lotteries are fundamentally the product of politics, driven by basic fiscal imperatives, elite-level jockeying, voter attitudes, and (particularly important) aggressive lobbying by the private lottery industry seeking lucrative contracts. Lotteries were established by politicians, and politicians could, in theory, dis-establish them.The second claim, which shifts the focus from politics to economics, is that the explosive growth of lotteries reflects the shifting contours of the American economy since the 1970s. Thus, lotteries went from offering middle-class stability in the 1970s—as one lottery executive put it in 1975, “we sell hope in a depressed economy”—to unimaginable riches in the increasingly unequal decades after (3). The growing sense that workers and families had to deal with economic challenges on their own (a transformation I have called “The Great Risk Shift”) encouraged a growing search for a ticket to upward mobility.Cohen’s final message is his most important: Those who think the United States should revive its long lottery-free era—and Cohen is unapologetically among them—need to listen to the Americans who buy all those tickets. Cohen’s research shows that lottery players are more likely to be low-income, non-white, male, and without a college degree. But he also situates their seemingly irrational bets within a broader context that encompasses not just wrenching economic shifts but also the uncomfortable fact that organs of the state are encouraging vulnerable citizens to make those bets. Drawing on first-hand accounts, Cohen asks us to consider why “tens of millions of Americans every single week … reason that their best hope for a new life lies in the luck of the draw” (207). In doing so, he makes a compelling case for an interdisciplinary approach not just to policy history but also to policy reform.

  PublisherDOI

• Unequal Democracies

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-12-07 · 16 citations

  bookOpen access

  While economic inequality has risen in every affluent democracy in North America and Western Europe, the last three decades have also been characterized by falling or stagnating levels of state-led economic redistribution. Why have democratically accountable governments not done more to distribute top-income shares to citizens with low- and middle-income? Unequal Democracies offers answers to this question, bringing together contributions that focus on voters and their demands for redistribution with contributions on elites and unequal representation that is biased against less-affluent citizens. While large and growing bodies of research have developed around each of these perspectives, this volume brings them into rare dialogue. Chapters also incorporate analyses that center exclusively on the United States and those that examine a broader set of advanced democracies to explore the uniqueness of the American case and its contribution to comparative perspectives. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Biased Politics of “Working Longer”

  2022-11-17 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Abstract: Why has there been such a limited response to the strains facing older Americans? The answer can be found in America’s “organized political economy,” the interaction of organized political actors and the distinctive structure of U.S. political institutions. This interaction has created three biases that have reduced responsiveness to older voters’ policy concerns, despite these voters’ centrality to the electoral coalition of the Republican Party: (1) a bias toward economic elites hostile to social spending and taxation; (2) a bias toward legislative gridlock caused by the “asymmetric polarization” of the parties, as Republicans have become a much more conservative force; and (3) a bias toward racial and cultural appeals, rather than ones addressing economic risks, as the GOP’s main means of gaining and holding power in a diversifying society. These three biases have pulled both parties toward the concerns and attitudes of the affluent. Their most profound effects, however, have been on the Republican Party. All three of these biases have encouraged Republicans to pursue hard-right positions unpopular even among their own base, hamstringing collective efforts to address the challenges facing older Americans.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Philipp Rehm

  171 shared

• Paul Pierson

  Arvalis - Institut du Végétal

  48 shared

• T. R. Marmor

  Yale University

  11 shared

• Alexander Hertel‐Fernandez

  8 shared

• Mark Schlesinger

  Yale University

  8 shared

• Jacob M. Grumbach

  5 shared

• Kathleen Thelen

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  5 shared

• Nicole Kazee

  Yale University

  4 shared

Awards & honors

• Aaron Wildavsky Enduring Contribution Award of the American…
• Robert Ball Award of the National Academy of Social Science…
• Inducted into the American Academy of Political and Social S…