Jennifer L. Hochschild
· Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government at Harvard University, Professor of African and African American Studies, and Harvard College ProfessorVerifiedHarvard University · African and African American Studies
Active 1979–2025
About
Jennifer L. Hochschild is the Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government at Harvard University, as well as a Professor of African and African American Studies and Professor of Public Policy. She has held significant academic leadership roles including Harvard College Professor, Chair of the Department of Government, and President of the American Political Science Association from 2015 to 2016. Additionally, she holds a lectureship in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Hochschild's research focuses on the intersections of race, class, and political dynamics in urban policy disputes. Her forthcoming book, Race/Class Conflict and Urban Financial Threat, to be published in January 2025 by the Russell Sage Foundation Press, explores how race and class inequalities influence political discord in American cities, while also identifying financial threat as a critical factor in shaping urban policy choices. Through case studies in four major cities, she examines issues such as policing, urban development, schooling, and budgeting, revealing the complex forces that drive policy conflicts beyond race and class alone.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Economics
- Law
- Sociology
- Social psychology
- Genealogy
- Psychology
- Genetics
- Demographic economics
- History
- Philosophy
- Environmental ethics
- Criminology
- Biology
- Public administration
- Political economy
Selected publications
Local Experience, National Media, and Misperceptions of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Political Communication · 2025-12-15
articleSenior authorUniversity Press of Kansas eBooks · 2025-05-12
book-chapterSenior authorCan We Desegregate Public Schools and Subsidized Housing?
University Press of Kansas eBooks · 2025-05-12
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingPolitical Science Quarterly · 2025-01-08
article1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Following up on their 2011 book, Still a House Divided, Rogers M. Smith and Desmond King argue in America's New Racial Battle Lines: Protect versus Repair, that the United States has recently entered a new racial institutional order. Its battle lines are organized around two alliances, each with social networks, control of some institutions, core political and ideological commitments, and specific policy goals. One alliance seeks to protect the historical and continuing hierarchy in which white people enjoy social, economic, and political dominance; the other seeks to repair American society so that Black people and other people of color become fully equal citizens and participants. In this review, I describe their analysis and then examine two questions emerging from it: what distinguishes an institutional order from a less fundamental and perhaps less durable political contest or social movement? And does an analysis centered on the Black-white binary sufficiently capture the complex nature of the United States' history and practice involving Native Americans, European immigrants, Latinos, Asian Americans, and other groups? I suggest how the protect versus repair battle lines might shift if a majority of Latinos move toward racialization or toward whiteness, or whether “racial” categories should be understood predominantly as varying intersections of race and class.
Race/Class Conflict and Urban Financial Threat
Russell Sage Foundation eBooks · 2024-01-01
book1st authorCorrespondingRace/Class Conflict and Urban Financial Threat
Russell Sage Foundation eBooks · 2024-07-30
book1st authorCorrespondingThe foundation of racial and class inequality shapes many of American cities’ policy disputes and corresponding political alignments—except when it does not. In this book, Jennifer L. Hochschild, begins with three controversial assertions: Particular policy issues in a city are associated with distinct political alignments, often independent of national-level partisan polarization or even political alignments around other policy issues. Race and class inequality underlies and often constructs these policy issues and associated political alignments. But not always: an existential threat, often based in market forces, sometimes supersedes race and class inequality in shaping policy disputes and political activity. The book’s examination of those assertions is organized around a central puzzle: When is race and class inequality at the core of a policy issue? If it is at the core, how is it manifested and how does it shape the policy arena and its accompanying politics? If race and class inequality is not at the core of a policy issue, what else is—and why is that alternative force more important? Hochschild engages with that puzzle by examining four policy arenas and their accompanying politics in four large American cities: policing, especially the tactic of Stop-Question-Frisk in New York City; development, especially near the rail-to-trail BeltLine in Atlanta; school reform, especially charter schools in Los Angeles Unified School District; and fiscal policy, especially public sector union pension funding, in Chicago.
Sarah R. Coleman. <i>The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America</i>.
The American Historical Review · 2023-12-01
article1st authorCorrespondingJournal Article Sarah R. Coleman. The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America. Get access Sarah R. Coleman. The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. 253. Cloth $35.00. Jennifer Hochschild Jennifer Hochschild Harvard University, US Email: hochschild@gov.harvard.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 4, December 2023, Pages 1847–1848, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad388 Published: 05 December 2023
Genetics in Medicine Open · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations
articleOpen accessSocial research · 2022-09-01 · 1 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingLearning from Experience?COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories and Their Implications for Democratic Discourse Jennifer Hochschild (bio) and David Beavers (bio) in a survey fielded on march 7, 2020, more than three times as many Democrats as Republicans (61 percent and 20 percent, respectively) agreed that the United States was concealing the true scale of SARS-CoV-2 deaths. Republicans were nearly 20 percentage points more likely than Democrats (57 percent and 38 percent, respectively) to agree that the coronavirus is a man-made epidemic. With fewer than 300 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States (CDC 2020), pandemic beliefs with no clear basis in fact were already flourishing and were already colored by Americans' partisan lenses. This case points to large questions. Although research shows that "basically all Americans hold conspiracy beliefs" (Smallpage et al. 2020, 264), we do not know enough about adherence to these beliefs and consequences for American politics. The very concept is contested—one person's plausible hypothesis or praise for imaginative thinking is another's conspiracy theory. But at least for those who see conspiracy theories as a threat to democratic governance, definitions share a few features. Karen Douglas and coauthors define [End Page 859] them as "attempts to explain the ultimate causes of significant social and political events and circumstances with claims of secret plots by two or more powerful actors" (Douglas et al. 2019, 4). Joseph Uscinski and his colleagues, who are among the most influential political scientists writing on this topic, similarly define a conspiracy theory as "a proposed explanation of events that cites as a main causal factor a small group of persons (the conspirators) acting in secret for their own benefit, against the common good" (Uscinski, Klofstad, and Atkinson 2016, 58). Such theories are not new to American politics. Richard Hofstadter set their pejorative framework by "borrowing a clinical term for other purposes" in describing conspiracism as a mental illness ([1964] 2008, 3). Although some argue that conspiracy theories should be analyzed neutrally or even favorably in some circumstances (Butter and Knight 2020a), most analysts of democracy agree with Hofstadter in fearing and condemning them. They worry that conspiracy theories are gaining importance in our era of partisan polarization, hyperpartisan media, disdain for norms of civility and facticity among some political elites, and digital networks' capacity to create "a global network of village idiots" (Lenny Pozner, in Kolbert 2019). Adherence to conspiracy theories might even be deadly. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, exposure to misinformation was associated with increased cases and deaths, most likely by discouraging individuals from wearing masks, socially distancing, and minimizing travel (Ash et al. 2020; Bursztyn et al. 2020). By March 2022, Americans over age 12 who were not vaccinated, sometimes due to acceptance of theories about vaccines' harms to one's body, were 17 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than were those who had received primary vaccines and a booster dose (CDC 2022). Coronavirus-related conspiracy narratives may also undermine democratic discourse and practice. Furious encounters between people with opposing views on COVID-19 are commonplace on- and offline. Patients and their families who deny the disease's existence have spit on and threatened medical staff, and some public health [End Page 860] experts feel under threat (McKay et al. 2020). Belief in a connection between COVID-19 and 5G telecommunications technology was positively associated with state anger and greater justification for violence now or perhaps in the future (Jolley and Paterson 2020). More generally, as one scholar summarizes, "conspiracy theories … have been linked to climate denial, vaccine refusal, political apathy, apathy in the workplace, prejudice, crime, and violence. … Conspiracy theories about COVID-19 are no exception" (Douglas 2021, 271). Despite the fact that some beliefs arguably endanger public health, democratic polities must be cautious about restraining conspiracy narratives. Commitments to freedom of speech and assembly, along with protections for privacy, civil liberty, and freedom from surveillance, make it difficult to balance the need for effective governance and public safety against the imperative of individual freedom. And disagreement about how to attempt the balance itself adds another layer of challenge to democracy. In the survey that we describe and analyze...
The double toll of viruses and social injustice
Nature · 2022-08-01
articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 3626 shared
Paula D. McClain
- 3601 shared
Michelle D. Deardorff
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
- 3601 shared
Juliet Hooker
Brown University
- 3601 shared
Nancy J. Hirschmann
- 3601 shared
Joan C. Tronto
Hunter College
- 3601 shared
Ruth Berins Collier
Rutgers Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights
- 3601 shared
Jane Junn
- 3600 shared
Joe Soss
Education
- 1972
B.A., Government
Princeton University
- 1974
M.A., Government
Harvard University
- 1978
Ph.D., Government
Harvard University
Awards & honors
- John W. Kluge Chair in American Law and Governance at the Li…
- Fellow at the Straus Institute of New York University School…
- Fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Vice-president of the American Political Science Association
- Fellowship from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
- Resume-aware match score
- Save to shortlist
- AI-drafted outreach
See your match with Jennifer L. Hochschild
PhdFit ranks faculty by your research interests, methods, and publications — grounded in their actual work, not templates.
- Free to start
- No credit card
- 30-second signup