T Skocpol
Biographic Data
| ID | 25883 |
|---|---|
| NAME | T Skocpol |
| GIVEN NAMES | T |
| FAMILY NAME | Skocpol |
| SIGNATURE | SKOCPOL T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University Press |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3866-8108 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 164 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5285 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 163 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 24 |
Rising Threats to U.S. Democracy
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 a…
Immigration Clashes, Party Polarization, and Republican Radicalization
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 pinpoint…
Institutional Capacities, Partisan Divisions, and Federal Tensions in U.S. Responses to the Covid-19 Pandemic
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 202…
Social Justice Campaigns and Democratic Party Gains
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 structure…
Social Policy in the United States
In "Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective," Theda Skocpol offers a comprehensive analysis of American social policy, tracing its evolution from the colonial era to the present. She argues against simplistic explanations that attribute policy outcomes solely to American values or institutional structures. Instead, Skocpol emphasizes the complex interplay of political struggles, institutional constraints…
Making Sense of Citizen Mobilizations against the Trump Presidency
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Resist, Persist, and Transform
The November 2016 election sparked nationwide resistance to the new Trump administration and Republican Congress. Initial studies have focused on public protests and professionally staffed advocacy organizations, but the resistance also includes thousands of volunteer-led grassroots groups. This article uses data from online surveys, fieldwork observations and interviews, and web searches to analyze the development, demographics, and activities o…
A Conversation with Theda Skocpol
An interview with Theda Skocpol took place at Harvard University in December 2017. Professor Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. Skocpol is the author of numerous books and articles well known in political science and beyond, including States and Social Revolutions, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life, and The Tea Party…
What a Mighty Power We Can Be
When Political Mega-Donors Join Forces
As economic inequalities have skyrocketed in the United States, scholars have started paying more attention to the individual political activities of billionaires and multimillionaires. Useful as such work may be, it misses an important aspect of plutocratic influence: the sustained efforts of organized groups and networks of political mega-donors, who work together over many years between as well as during elections to reshape politics. Our work…
Conclusion
Conclusion
The Koch Network and Republican Party Extremism
Presidential election years attract attention to the rhetoric, personalities, and agendas of contending White House aspirants, but these headlines do not reflect the ongoing political shifts that will confront whoever moves into the White House in 2017. Earthquakes and erosions have remade the U.S. political terrain, reconfiguring the ground on which politicians and social groups must maneuver, and it is important to make sure that narrow and sho…
Asymmetric Interest Group Mobilization and Party Coalitions in U.S. Tax Politics
Arguments about national tax policy have taken center stage in U.S. politics in recent times, creating acute dilemmas for Democrats. With Republicans locked into antitax agendas for some time, Democrats have recently begun to push back, arguing for maintaining or even increasing taxes on the very wealthy in the name of deficit reduction and the need to sustain funding for public programs. But the Democratic Party as a whole has not been able to f…
States and Social Revolutions
State structures, international forces, and class relations: Theda Skocpol shows how all three combine to explain the origins and accomplishments of social-revolutionary transformations. Social revolutions have been rare but undeniably of enormous importance in modern world history. States and Social Revolutions provides a new frame of reference for analyzing the causes, the conflicts, and the outcomes of such revolutions. It develops a rigorous,…
How the Scholars Strategy Network Helps Academics Gain Public Influence
Many American professors are looking for innovative ways to engage policymakers and fellow citizens—and the boldest new endeavor is the fast-growing Scholars Strategy Network. Since 2011, “SSN” (as it is called) has enrolled more than 470 scholars from many disciplines working at over 140 colleges and universities. Many members participate in issue-oriented groups to address major national challenges—ranging from voting rights and the effects of …
Obama and America's Political Future
Barack Obama’s galvanizing victory in 2008, coming amid the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s, opened the door to major reforms. But the president quickly faced skepticism from supporters and fierce opposition from Republicans, who scored sweeping wins in the 2010 midterm election. Here, noted political scientist Theda Skocpol surveys the political landscape and explores its most consequential questions: What happened to Obama’s “new New D…
Obama and America's Political Future
The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism
On February 19, 2009, CNBC commentator Rick Santelli delivered a dramatic rant against Obama administration programs to shore up the plunging housing market. Invoking the Founding Fathers and ridiculing "losers" who could not pay their mortgages, Santelli called for "Tea Party" protests. Over the next two years, conservative activists took to the streets and airways, built hundreds of local Tea Party groups, and weighed in with votes and money to…
Civil Society in the United States
Accomplished and Embattled
THEDA SKOCPOL is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University, and LAWRENCE R. JACOBS holds the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies and serves as Director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance in the Hubert H. Humphrey School at the University of Minnesota, where he is also professor of political science. Skocpol has recently published The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republ…
Black Greek-Letter Organizations 2.0
As members of the sorority, women are always required to represent their organization in the best possible way, whether in behavior or in the manner of dressing. Sorority sisters adhere to a strict code of conduct and demand high standards of fellow members to maintain the organization’s image or front, allowing them to actively recruit and promote notably exceptional women. This process is known as “appearance enforcement.” This chapter examines…
The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism
In the aftermath of a potentially demoralizing 2008 electoral defeat, when the Republican Party seemed widely discredited, the emergence of the Tea Party provided conservative activists with a new identity funded by Republican business elites and reinforced by a network of conservative media sources. Untethered from recent GOP baggage and policy specifics, the Tea Party energized disgruntled white middle-class conservatives and garnered widesprea…
Excellence in Mentoring Award
Bringing the State Back In
Taking off from theoretical and research agendas encouraged in the 1985 book Bringing the State Back In , this article traces developments in several areas of scholarship: studies of social revolutions and regime transformations; studies of the development of welfare states; and studies of social capital and democratic effectiveness. In all of these literatures, the author's own research and the research of many other scholars has been enriched b…
States and Social Revolutions
State structures, international forces, and class relations: Theda Skocpol shows how all three combine to explain the origins and accomplishments of social-revolutionary transformations. From France in the 1790s to Vietnam in the 1970s, social revolutions have been rare but undeniably of enormous importance in modern world history. States and Social Revolutions provides a new frame of reference for analyzing the causes, the conflicts, and the out…
Protecting Soldiers and Mothers
States and Social Revolutions
State structures, international forces, and class relations: Theda Skocpol shows how all three combine to explain the origins and accomplishments of social-revolutionary transformations. Social revolutions have been rare but undeniably of enormous importance in modern world history. States and Social Revolutions provides a new frame of reference for analyzing the causes, the conflicts, and the outcomes of such revolutions. It develops a rigorous,…
The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry
Comparative history is not new. As long as people have investigated social life, there has been recurrent fascination with juxtaposing historical patterns from two or more times or places. Part of the appeal comes from the general usefulness of looking at historical trajectories in order to study social change. Indeed, practitioners of comparative history from Alexis de Tocqueville and Max Weber to Marc Bloch, Reinhard Bendix, and Barrington Moor…
The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism
In the aftermath of a potentially demoralizing 2008 electoral defeat, when the Republican Party seemed widely discredited, the emergence of the Tea Party provided conservative activists with a new identity funded by Republican business elites and reinforced by a network of conservative media sources. Untethered from recent GOP baggage and policy specifics, the Tea Party energized disgruntled white middle-class conservatives and garnered widesprea…
States and Social Policies
Comparative social scientists have developed various arguments about the determinants of social policies, especially those connected with twentieth-century 'welfare states.' Structure-functionalists argue that the social policies of modern nations necessarily converge due to an underlying logic of industrialism, while neo-Marxists treat such policies as state responses to the social reproduction requirements of advanced capitalism. Yet most stude…
State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal
descent from parliamentary democracy into the Nazi dictatorship. No such radical change of regime occurred in the United States. Yet the Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first two presidential terms (1933-1940) was one of the most innovative sets of measures put through by any of the liberaldemocratic governments caught up in the maelstrom of the Great Depression. In the context of U.S. history, moreover, the New Deal-along with the national m…
A Nation of Organizers
We challenge the widely held view that classic American voluntary groups were tiny, local, and disconnected from government. Using newly collected data to develop a theoretically framed account, we show that membership associations emerged early in U.S. history and converged toward the institutional form of the representatively governed federation. This form enabled leaders and members to spread interconnected groups across an expanding nation. A…
Political Response to Capitalist Crisis
Why Not Equal Protection? Explaining the Politics of Public Social Spending in Britain, 1900-1911, and the United States, 1880s-1920
Ann Shola Orloff, Theda Skocpol, Why Not Equal Protection? Explaining the Politics of Public Social Spending in Britain, 1900-1911, and the United States, 1880s-1920, American Sociological Review, Vol. 49, No. 6 (Dec., 1984), pp. 726-750
The Koch Network and Republican Party Extremism
Presidential election years attract attention to the rhetoric, personalities, and agendas of contending White House aspirants, but these headlines do not reflect the ongoing political shifts that will confront whoever moves into the White House in 2017. Earthquakes and erosions have remade the U.S. political terrain, reconfiguring the ground on which politicians and social groups must maneuver, and it is important to make sure that narrow and sho…
Explaining Revolutions in the Contemporary Third World
Social Revolutions in the Modern World
In this collection of essays, Theda Skocpol, author of the award-winning book States and Social Revolutions (1979), updates her arguments about social revolutions. How are we to understand recent revolutionary upheavals in countries across the globe? Why have social revolutions happened in some countries, but not in others that seem similar? Skocpol shows how she and other scholars have used ideas about states and societies to identify the partic…
Women's Associations and the Enactment of Mothers' Pensions in the United States
Mothers' pensions were the first explicit welfare benefits established outside of poor relief in the United States. Contrary to established wisdom in political science, their enabling statutes spread very quickly across most states in the 1910s, with smaller, nonindustrial states often in the vanguard. Previous research concerning the predictors of state-level policy innovations has focused on a small subset of possible explanatory variables, typ…
Voice and Inequality
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Wallerstein's World Capitalist System
The Role of Theory in Comparative Politics
The Center of International Studies at Princeton University organized a symposium during 1993—94 on the role of theory in comparative politics. Presented here is an edited and condensed version of the proceedings. In light of recent challenges posed by both rational choice and post-modern cultural approaches, the symposium helped elucidate the merits of competing theoretical approaches. A group of distinguished scholars presented a variety of vie…
What Makes Peasants Revolutionary
The Rush to Organize
Americans long been a people given to organizing and joining voluntary membership associations. Associational growth started early in the nation's history, yet accelerated from the 1860s through the early 1900s. Many researchers argued that modernizing forces propelled associational development, but this seemingly obvious explanation has been challenged by scholars who stress the impact of the Civil War, government institutions, political process…
Did Capitalists Shape Social Security
Social Revolutions and Mass Military Mobilization
Despite their limited accomplishments in promoting economic development, the authoritarian regimes brought to power through social-revolutionary transformations—from the French Revolution of the 18th century to the Iranian Revolution of the present—have excelled at conducting humanly costly wars with a special fusion of popular zeal, meritocratic professionalism, and central coordination. Revolutionary elites, whether communist or not, have been …
Rentier state and Shi'a Islam in the Iranian Revolution
Cultural Idioms and Political Ideologies in the Revolutionary Reconstruction of State Power
France, Russia, China
A revolution', writes Samuel P. Huntington in Political Order in Changing Societies, 'is a rapid, fundamental, and violent domestic change in the dominant values arfd myths of a society, in its political institutions, social structure, leadership, and government activities and policies'.1 In The Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, Lenin provides a different, but complementary perspective: 'Revolutions', he says, 'are the…
Why I Am an Historical Institutionalist
A Critical Review of Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy
The Formation of National States in Western Europe
The Modernization of Japan and Russia
Old Regime Legacies and Communist Revolutions in Russia and China
Journal Article Old Regime Legacies and Communist Revolutions in Russia and China Get access Theda Skocpol Theda Skocpol Harvard University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, Volume 55, Issue 2, December 1976, Pages 284–315, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/55.2.284 Published: 01 December 1976
France, Russia, China
A revolution', writes Samuel P. Huntington in Political Order in Changing Societies, 'is a rapid, fundamental, and violent domestic change in the dominant values arfd myths of a society, in its political institutions, social structure, leadership, and government activities and policies'.1 In The Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, Lenin provides a different, but complementary perspective: 'Revolutions', he says, 'are the…
Urban Networks in Ch'ing China and Tokugawa Japan
Wallerstein's World Capitalist System
Total Revolution
The Russian Revolution
City, Class and Power
Urban problems are increasingly at the heart of political debate in industrial capitalist societies. The Italian Left obtained a majority in the 1975 municipal elections in all the large towns, in part on the basis of urban protests and partly on the strength of being an alternative form of local government. The same phenomenon occurred in Japan, where socialists and communists, because they have given priority to urban and environmental issues, …
Revolution and the Transformation of Societies
Social Change in the Twentieth Century.Daniel Chirot
States and Social Revolutions
State structures, international forces, and class relations: Theda Skocpol shows how all three combine to explain the origins and accomplishments of social-revolutionary transformations. From France in the 1790s to Vietnam in the 1970s, social revolutions have been rare but undeniably of enormous importance in modern world history. States and Social Revolutions provides a new frame of reference for analyzing the causes, the conflicts, and the out…
State and revolution
States and Social Revolutions
List of tables and maps Preface Introduction 1. Explaining social revolutions: alternatives to existing theories Part I. Causes of Social Revolutions in France, Russia and China: 2. Old-regime states in crisis 3. Agrarian structures and peasant insurrections Part II. Outcomes of Social Revolutions in France, Russia and China: 4. What changed and how: a focus on state building 5. The birth of a 'modern state edifice' in France 6. The emergence of …
Macro Mastery
Political Response to Capitalist Crisis
States and Social Revolutions
States and Social Revolutions. A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China
The Development of the Modern State
States and Social Revolutions
The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry
Comparative history is not new. As long as people have investigated social life, there has been recurrent fascination with juxtaposing historical patterns from two or more times or places. Part of the appeal comes from the general usefulness of looking at historical trajectories in order to study social change. Indeed, practitioners of comparative history from Alexis de Tocqueville and Max Weber to Marc Bloch, Reinhard Bendix, and Barrington Moor…
Gouldner at His Best
States and Social Revolutions. A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China
Capitalism Isn't Everything
Capitalism Isn't Everything Get access Theda Skocpol Theda Skocpol University of Chicago Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Problems, Volume 28, Issue 5, 1 June 1981, Pages 519–521, https://doi.org/10.2307/800225 Published: 30 July 2014
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