Lester Lawrence Lessig III is an American legal scholar, academic, and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Lessig was a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president of the United States in the 2016 U.S. presidential election but withdrew before the primaries.
Shirley Marie Tilghman, is a Canadian scholar in molecular biology and an academic administrator. She is now a professor of molecular biology and public policy and president emerita of Princeton University. In 2002, Discover magazine recognized her as one of the 50 most important women in science.
William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist. He is a professor at Harvard University and author of works on urban sociology, race and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.
Philip Ernest Converse was an American political scientist. He was a professor in political science and sociology at the University of Michigan who conducted research on public opinion, survey research, and quantitative social science.
Robert Alan Dahl was an American political theorist and Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University.
Cass Robert Sunstein is an American legal scholar known for his studies of constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, and behavioral economics. He is also The New York Times best-selling author of The World According to Star Wars (2016) and Nudge (2008). He was the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2012.
Theda Skocpol is an American sociologist and political scientist, who is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. She is a highly influential figure in both sociology and political science. She is best known as an advocate of the historical-institutional and comparative approaches, as well as her "state autonomy theory". She has written widely for both popular and academic audiences. She has been President of the American Political Science Association and the Social Science History Association.
An independent voter, often also called an unaffiliated voter or non-affiliated voter in the United States, is a voter who does not align themselves with a political party. An independent is variously defined as a voter who votes for candidates on issues rather than on the basis of a political ideology or partisanship; a voter who does not have long-standing loyalty to, or identification with, a political party; a voter who does not usually vote for the same political party from election to election; or a voter who self-describes as an independent.
The conservative coalition, founded in 1937, was an unofficial alliance of members of the United States Congress which brought together the conservative wings of the Republican and Democratic parties to oppose President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. In addition to Roosevelt, the conservative coalition dominated Congress for four presidencies, blocking legislation proposed by Roosevelt and his successors. By 1937, the conservatives were the largest faction in the Republican Party which had opposed the New Deal in some form since 1933. Despite Roosevelt being a Democrat himself, his party did not universally support the New Deal agenda in Congress. Democrats who opposed Roosevelt's policies tended to hold conservative views, and allied with conservative Republicans. These Democrats were mostly located in the South. According to James T. Patterson: "By and large the congressional conservatives agreed in opposing the spread of federal power and bureaucracy, in denouncing deficit spending, in criticizing industrial labor unions, and in excoriating most welfare programs. They sought to 'conserve' an America which they believed to have existed before 1933."
Richard Francis Fenno Jr. was an American political scientist known for his pioneering work on the U.S. Congress and its members. He was Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Rochester. He published numerous books and scholarly articles focused on how members of Congress interacted with each other, with committees, and with constituents. Political scientists considered the research groundbreaking and startlingly original and gave him numerous awards. Many followed his research design on how to follow members from Washington back to their home districts. Fenno was best known for identifying the tendency — dubbed "Fenno's Paradox" — of how most voters say they dislike Congress as a whole, but they trust and reelect their local Congressman.
Marina von Neumann Whitman is an American economist, writer and former automobile executive. She is a professor of business administration and public policy at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business as well as The Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.
Samuel J. Eldersveld was an American academic, political scientist, and Democratic politician. He served as Mayor of Ann Arbor, Michigan from 1957 to 1959.
Dennis Frank Thompson is a political scientist and professor at Harvard University, where he founded the university-wide Center for Ethics and the Professions. Thompson is known for his pioneering work in the fields of both political ethics and democratic theory. According to a recent appraisal, he has become “influential within the world of political theory" by offering “greater concrete political thought than Rawls” and by showing “an atypical grasp, for a political theorist, of the real political world.”
Party identification refers to the political party with which an individual identifies. Party identification is affiliation with a political party. Party identification is typically determined by the political party that an individual most commonly supports.
Danielle Susan Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University. She is also the Director of the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard Kennedy School.
Congress: The Electoral Connection is a book by David Mayhew, first published in 1974, that applies rational choice theory to the actions of American Congressmen. Mayhew argues that Congressmen are motivated by re-election.
Donald Philip Green is a political scientist and quantitative methodologist at Columbia University. Green's primary research interests lie in the development of statistical methods for field experiments and their application to American voting behavior.
Howard Lewis Rosenthal was an American political scientist who was professor of politics at New York University. He also taught at Carnegie-Mellon University and Princeton University, where he was the Roger Williams Straus professor of social sciences.
Frances E. Lee, an American political scientist, is currently a professor of politics and public affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She previously taught at Case Western Reserve University and the University of Maryland, College Park. Lee specializes in American politics focusing on the U.S. Congress. From 2014 to 2019, Lee was co-editor of Legislative Studies Quarterly and is the first editor of Cambridge University Press's American Politics Elements Series. Her 2009 book Beyond Ideology has been cited over 600 times in the political science literature. Lee is also a co-author of the seminal textbook Congress and Its Members, currently in its eighteenth edition.
