About

Robin Stryker is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Purdue University, who joined the faculty in 2018 after ten years at the University of Arizona. Her academic background includes a BA summa cum laude in Sociology from Smith College, and MS and PhD degrees in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also received legal training at Yale Law School and the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University. Her research spans multiple disciplines including sociology, law, political science, communication, and history, with a focus on law, politics, and inequality, organizational and institutional change, political and legal legitimacy, the comparative welfare state and social policy, discrimination, civil and social rights, sociological theory and methods, the social psychology of identity, and incivility, politics, and the media. Stryker has held faculty positions at the University of Minnesota and the University of Iowa, and has been a visiting professor at EHESS and Sciences-Po in Paris. Her scholarship is widely published in prominent journals, and she has co-edited a book titled 'Closing the Rights Gap: From Human Rights to Social Transformation.' She has received numerous awards, fellowships, and research grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Stryker has served in various leadership roles within professional associations such as the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, and has been involved in editorial and advisory boards. Her work has been recognized with multiple awards for her scholarly articles, and she is known for her contributions to understanding law, social policy, and social change.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Computer Security
• Psychology
• Sociology
• Cognitive science
• Epistemology
• Law
• Social psychology
• Engineering
• Philosophy
• Aesthetics
• Engineering ethics

Selected publications

• Political Identity Moderators of Partisan-Based Motivated Reasoning in Perceiving Political Incivility

  Frontiers in sociology and social research · 2026-01-01

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• Democracy Under Siege: The Demise of Successful United States Federal Campaign Finance Reform

  Studies in American Political Development · 2026-01-07

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  Abstract Private funding of U.S. federal elections is at record levels, with most money contributed by a few very wealthy individuals and organizations. Cross-partisan majorities of the American public consistently express concern, and proposed campaign finance reforms are introduced as frequently in Congress recently as earlier in time. Despite these facts, and that successful twentieth century reforms often were preceded by corruption scandal, that these continue today, that there remain political entrepreneurs for reform, that reformers continue to use corruption framing, and that the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision left some reform strategies open, no proposed campaign finance reforms to curb moneyed interests’ influence have been enacted since the 2002 BCRA. We address this puzzle through comparative process tracing of forty reform efforts receiving consideration in a congressional committee from 1907 to 2024. We identify three ideal-type reform trajectories—scandal as agenda-setter, the Supreme Court as agenda-setter, and a multiple legislative trajectories type—through which campaign finance reforms through 2002 sometimes were successful. We then show how and why a combination of changes in the political, media, and legal environments doomed reform efforts post-2002 and especially post-2010 to almost certain failure. We draw implications for federal political discourse and policy-making more generally.

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• Meet Richard T. Serpe: 2025 Cooley-Mead Award Winner for 2025

  Social Psychology Quarterly · 2026-04-29

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• What Does the Next Decade of Identity Theory Hold? A Crowdsourced Answer on Future Directions of Research

  Frontiers in sociology and social research · 2026-01-01

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• Social Psychology and Politics

  Handbooks of sociology and social research · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

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• The Crucible of Desegregation: The Uncertain Search for Educational Equality The Crucible of Desegregation: The Uncertain Search for Educational Equality, by Shep MelnickR.. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. 326 pp. $35.00 paper. ISBN: 9780226825526.

  Contemporary Sociology A Journal of Reviews · 2025-01-01

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• Emotional Markers of Disrespect: A Fourth Dimension of Perceived Political Incivility?

  Communication Research · 2024-01-25 · 7 citations

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  Research has investigated emotional responses to perceived political incivility but not whether aspects of emotionality may be perceived as uncivil. When politicians display or evoke anger, they may increase democratic participation; however, because manifesting or evoking some negative emotions suggests disrespect—a central component of extant conceptualizations of political incivility—displaying anger and evoking fear and anger may be perceived as aspects of incivility. We test this using confirmatory factor analysis on a national sample of over 2,000 Americans. We find an overarching construct of perceived political incivility including not only three previously identified dimensions but also a fourth dimension reflecting negative emotions including fear and anger. Despite heterogeneity in perceived incivility, about 70% or more of respondents view behaviors including trolling and intentionally evoking anger and fear as mostly or very uncivil.

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• Remembrances of Lauren B. Edelman both personal and professional

  Law & Society Review · 2023-09-01

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  Well, that's a fine pickle! I really want to write this essay to honor Lauren B. Edelman (Laurie to me and many others). But, I also don't want to write it because writing it means acknowledging that Laurie has died—way, WAY too early. I haven't really wanted to acknowledge this incredibly distressing reality. I shall miss Laurie in perpetuity as one of my closest intellectual interlocutors and colleagues and also as one of my dearest friends.

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• “Calling Out Our Own for Political Incivility? Identity and Shared Versus Oppositional Partisanship in Perceptions of Name-Calling and Deception”

  Frontiers in sociology and social research · 2023-01-01 · 4 citations

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• Hommage à Lauren B. Edelman

  Droit et société · 2023-08-24

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  que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement.

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Recent grants

• Social Science in Government Regulation of Equal Employment Opportunity

  NSF · $176k · 2005–2009

Frequent coauthors

• Bethany Anne Conway

  California Polytechnic State University

  6 shared

• LaDawn Haglund

  6 shared

• Nicholas Pedriana

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  4 shared

• Vasundhara Kaul

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  4 shared

• Richard T. Serpe

  Kent State University

  3 shared

• Pamela Wald

  Saint Louis University

  3 shared

• Shawn Bauldry

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  3 shared

• Scott R. Eliason

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2008)
• Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stan…
• Earl H. Carroll Magellan Fellow in the College of Social and…
• Scholar of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of…
• University Faculty Scholar at the University of Iowa (1993-1…