Kay Lehman Schlozman

Last updated

Kay Lehman Schlozman
Born(1946-12-23)December 23, 1946
Nationality American
Alma mater
Scientific career
Fields Political science
Institutions
Doctoral advisor Sidney Verba

Kay Lehman Schlozman (born December 23, 1946) is an American political scientist, currently the J. Joseph Moakley Professor of Political Science at Boston College. Schlozman has made fundamental advancements to the study of participation in American politics, and was a pioneer in the field of gender and politics. Her contributions include the theory of civic voluntarism, several landmark studies on the relationship between access to resources and different types of political participation, and related investigations into the nature of civic culture. Schlozman has one of the highest citation counts of any political scientist, including being among the top 50 most cited active political scientists and top 10 most cited women in the discipline. She worked closely with Sidney Verba for nearly 50 years, first as his student and then as his collaborator.

Contents

Early life and education

Schlozman was born on December 23, 1946 [1] in Chicago, Illinois to Elliot Lehman and Frances Lehman. [2] [3] Schlozman majored in sociology and minored in English at Wellesley College, graduating with a BA in 1968. [4] She then completed an MA and a PhD in political science at the University of Chicago in 1973 under the supervision of Sidney Verba. [3]

Career and contributions

Schlozman became a political science professor at Boston College in 1974. [3] When she arrived at Boston College, Schlozman was the only woman in the department (and only one of 7 woman professors then working at Boston College), soon becoming the first woman in that department to receive tenure. [3] She has been a visiting professor at Wellesley College, Harvard University, and Paris Diderot University, as well as a Fulbright Lecturer at Aix-Marseille University.

Schlozman has published widely on the causes of participation or non-participation in American politics, and the political mechanisms and institutions that enable and hinder civic engagement in America. She has focused particularly on gender and politics, the roles of interest groups in political processes, and political parties and elections in the United States. [5] [6] Schlozman is the coauthor of six books, and the editor of two more. She has also been noted for innovative teaching, and for unusually high departmental and professional service. [3]

Political participation and institutions

Schlozman has contributed to the theory of political participation for four decades. Her first book was Injury to Insult: Unemployment, Class and Political Response, coauthored with Sidney Verba, which surveyed unemployed Americans to address the paradox that the unemployed, who appear to have the most to gain from political engagement, are also disproportionately politically inactive. [7] [8] Schlozman turned her attention to political structures and institutions in her second book, Organized Interests and American Democracy, in which she and her coauthor John T. Tierney used extensive interviews to document the expansion of interest groups in Washington, D.C. during the 1980s.

In 1995 Schlozman wrote perhaps her most important work, Voice and Equality: Civic voluntarism and American politics, with Sidney Verba and Henry E. Brady. This book develops a three-factor model of political engagement that the authors call "civic voluntarism". They develop and test the claim that citizens can only become political participants if they possess all three of the following conditions: the resources to engage in politics, a psychological engagement in politics, and some connection to a political recruitment network. [9] John Aldrich reviewed Voice and Equality positively, writing that while it is not a complete theory of political participation in itself, it "will be a component of all kinds of theories of political behavior", while Jane Mansbridge described it as a fundamental advance in the theory of political participation that "documents how even in the realm of citizen participation liberal democracies fail to live up to the norm of equal responsiveness to the interests of each citizen". [9]

Schlozman, Verba, and Brady further developed and tested their resource theory for several decades, and in 2012 they analyzed the implications of wealth inequality on political participation under the resource model in a book called The unheavenly chorus: Unequal political voice and the broken promise of American democracy. The book was noted for compiling and presenting data from throughout the authors' half-century of data collection. In 2018 the authors followed this analysis with a final book, Unequal and unrepresented: Political inequality and the peoples' voice in the new gilded age, but the nearly half century-long collaboration between Schlozman, Verba, and Brady ended with Verba's death in 2019. [10]

Gender and politics

In addition to being a central scholar in the study of political participation, Schlozman was a pioneer in the study of gender and politics. One of her first works to explicitly engage with gender was an early article on campus sexual harassment; in 1991, prompted by allegations of sexual harassment against another member of her department at Boston College, Schlozman wrote an academic article investigating the sexual harassment of students by faculty members. [3]

Most of Schlozman's work relating to gender, however, has also been connected to her interests in political participation. Her 2001 book The Private Roots of Public Action: Gender, Equality and Political Participation, coauthored with Nancy Burns and Sidney Verba, adds another dimension to the three requirements for participation that Verba, Schlozman, and Brady had studied in Voice and Equality: they now consider the influences on participation of citizens' private lives through mechanisms like domestic power relations and differential treatment in the workplace. [11] They show that a small gender gap persisted in American political participation in the early 1990s even when political participation is understood quite broadly, [12] with men performing slightly more political actions than women, but they argue that even a very small gap on an individual level can produce real differences in representation and policy outcomes in the aggregate. [13] The book tests the hypothesis that individuals' private (and necessarily gendered) experiences affect their level of public political participation, using the theory of civic voluntarism. This addition to the theory was well-received. [14] [15]

Impact

Schlozman is one of the most-cited scholars in political science. In 2019, she was ranked as the 45th most cited active political scientist in the world in a citation analysis by the political scientists Hannah June Kim and Bernard Grofman. [16] This made her the 8th most cited woman who was actively conducting research in political science, as well as one of the 25 most-cited scholars who obtained their PhD between 1970 and 1974, and one of the 25 most-cited researchers of American politics. [16] Many of her books and articles are considered landmark developments in the study of political participation, gender and politics, and civic culture. [3] [6] [10]

Kay Schlozman is married to Stanley Schlozman. Schlozman's son, Daniel Schlozman, is also a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, and her daughter, Julia Schlozman, is an attorney. [3]

Awards and recognition

In 2003, Schlozman was named a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [6] Some of her major awards include:

Related Research Articles

Sidney Verba was an American political scientist, librarian and library administrator. His academic interests were mainly American and comparative politics. He was the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard University and also served Harvard as the director of the Harvard University Library from 1984 to 2007.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gabriel Almond</span> American political scientist (1911–2002)

Gabriel Abraham Almond was an American political scientist best known for his pioneering work on comparative politics, political development, and political culture.

Voluntarism, sometimes referred to as voluntary action, is the principle that individuals are free to choose goals and how to achieve them within the bounds of certain societal and cultural constraints, as opposed to actions that are coerced or predetermined. The term "voluntarism" is derived from Latin word "voluntary," which means 'will'. The term voluntary association is variously defined. Voluntary organizations are known by several other names : Non-Governmental Organisations(NGOS), private voluntary organizations(PVOS) and so on depending on the geographic area and time period of reference. In general these organizations, regardless of terminology used, have certain characteristics; that they are non-government and non profit, that they are voluntary. The term NGO has become popular in the 1980s and 1990s and is extensively used in the field of development, where as the term "voluntary organization" had been used widely for social welfare and charity organizations. But these two terms are used interchangeably as both denote the same characteristics.

Norman H. Nie was an American social scientist, university professor, inventor, and pioneering technology entrepreneur, known for being one of the developers of the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1943, Nie was educated at the University of the Americas in Mexico City, Washington University in St. Louis and Stanford University, where he received a Ph.D. in political science in 1971. He died on April 2, 2015, of lung cancer.

A civic culture or civic political culture is a political culture characterized by "acceptance of the authority of the state" and "a belief in participation in civic duties". The term was first used in Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba's book, The Civic Culture. Civic political culture is a mixture of other political cultures namely parochial, subject and participant political cultures. Almond and Verba characterised Britain as having a civic political culture. In "Is Britain Still a Civic Culture?" Patrick Seyd and Paul Whiteley discuss the extent to which Britain can still be regarded as having a civic political culture. The term civic culture is used to identify the political culture characteristics that explain the stability of a democratic society's political structure.

<i>The Civic Culture</i>

The Civic Culture or The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations is a 1963 political science book by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba. The book is credited with popularizing the political culture sub-field and is considered to be the first systematic study in this field.

Feminist political theory is an area of philosophy that focuses on understanding and critiquing the way political philosophy is usually construed and on articulating how political theory might be reconstructed in a way that advances feminist concerns. Feminist political theory combines aspects of both feminist theory and political theory in order to take a feminist approach to traditional questions within political philosophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ailsa McKay</span> 20th and 21st-century Scottish economist

Ailsa McKay was a Scottish economist, government policy adviser, a leading feminist economist and Professor of Economics at Glasgow Caledonian University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jane Mansbridge</span>

Jane Jebb Mansbridge is an American political scientist. She is the Charles F. Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Naomi Zack is a professor of philosophy at Lehman College, City University of New York (CUNY), having formerly been a professor at the University of Albany and the University of Oregon. She has written thirteen books and three textbooks, and she has edited or co-edited five anthologies, in addition to publishing a large number of papers and book chapters, particularly in areas having to deal with race, feminism, and natural disasters. Zack has taken on a number of professional roles related to the representation of women and other under-represented groups in philosophy. Zack is also a member of the editorial boards of multiple journals, including Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, The Journal of Race and Policy, Ethnic Studies: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Culture, Race and Ethnicity, and the Radical Philosophical Review.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lise Vogel</span> American Marxist-feminist sociologist and art historian (b. 1938)

Lise Vogel is a feminist sociologist and art historian from the United States. An influential Marxist-feminist theoretician, she is recognised for being one of the main founders of the Social Reproduction Theory. She also participated in the civil rights and the women's liberation movements in organisations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi and Bread & Roses in Boston. In her earlier career as an art historian, she was one of the first to try to develop a feminist perspective on Art History.

Carol C. Gould is an American philosopher and feminist theorist. Since 2009, she has taught at City University of New York, where she is currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College, and in the Doctoral Programs of Philosophy and Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is Director of the Center for Global Ethics and Politics at the Ralph Bunche Institute. Gould is also editor-in-chief of the Journal of Social Philosophy. Her 2004 book Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights received the 2009 David Easton Award which is given by the American Political Science Association "for a book that broadens the horizons of contemporary political science." Her 2014 book Interactive Democracy: The Social Roots of Global Justice received the 2015 Joseph B. Gittler Award from the American Philosophical Association for "an outstanding scholarly contribution in the field of the philosophy of one or more of the social sciences."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henry E. Brady</span> American political scientist

Henry E. Brady is an American political scientist specializing in methodology and its application in a diverse array of political fields. He is Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at University of California, Berkeley and holds the Class of 1941 Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy. He was elected President of the American Political Science Association, 2009–2010, giving a presidential address entitled "The Art of Political Science: Spatial Diagrams as Iconic and Revelatory." He has published academic works on diverse topics, co-authoring with colleagues at a variety of institutions and ranks, as well as many solo authored works. His principal areas of research are on political behavior in the United States, Canada, and the former Soviet Union, public policy and methodological work on scaling and dimensional analysis. When he became President of the American Political Science Association, a number of his colleagues and co-authors contributed to his presidential biography entitled "Henry Brady, Big Scientist," discussing his work and the fields to which he has contributed and has also shaped.

Linda McClain is the Robert B. Kent Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law, and was previously the Rivkin Radler Distinguished Professor of Law at Hofstra Law School. McClain's work focuses on family law, sex equality, and feminist legal theory.

The Victoria Schuck Award is an annual prize granted by the American Political Science Association to the author of the best book published in the previous year on the topic of women and politics. The award is named in honor of the political scientist Victoria Schuck. Although a number of area-specific sections of the American Political Science Association have dedicated book awards, the Schuck Award is one of only a few awards given directly by the Association rather than by a subsection of it.

Mala Htun is an American political scientist, currently a professor of political science at the University of New Mexico. Htun studies comparative politics, particularly women's rights and the politics of race and ethnicity with a focus on Latin America.

Eileen McDonagh is an American political scientist. She is a professor of political science at Northeastern University. She has published works on topics like women's participation in politics, gender imbalances in sport, and abortion law.

Mona Lena Krook is an American political scientist. She is a Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, where she is also the Chair of the Women and Politics Ph.D. Program. She studies the political representation of women, particularly gender quotas in governments and the phenomenon of violence against women in politics.

Roberta S. Sigel was an American political scientist. Her research focused on political psychology, political socialization, and gender and politics. She extended research into the political socialization of children and adolescents to study how people learn about politics and develop their political orientations throughout adulthood. She spent much of her career as a distinguished professor of political science at Rutgers University.

References

  1. ↑ "Swarthmore College Libraries database". Tripod. Swarthmore College. Retrieved 2 November 2019.
  2. ↑ "Elliot Lehman Obituary". Martha's Vineyard Times. 5 May 2016.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Martin, Colleen (4 November 2018). "Schlozman Shakes Up Political Science Dept. Since '74". The Heights. Boston, Massachusetts. Retrieved 2 November 2019.
  4. 1 2 3 4 "Kay L. Schlozman Biography". Boston College Political Science Faculty.
  5. ↑ "Scholar spotlight: Kay Lehman Schlozman and Samara Klar". 6 July 2018. Retrieved 2 November 2019.
  6. 1 2 3 4 "Kay Lehman Schlozman". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. March 2018. Retrieved 2 November 2019.
  7. ↑ Brody, Richard A. (September 1980). "Book Review: Injury to Insult: Unemployment, Class and Political Response by Kay Lehman Schlozman and Sidney Verba". The American Political Science Review. 74 (3): 832–833. doi:10.2307/1958193. JSTOR   1958193. S2CID   148131706.
  8. ↑ Burstein, Paul (September 1982). "Review of Injury to Insult: Unemployment, Class and Political Response". Social Forces. 60 (3). doi:10.2307/2578411. JSTOR   2578411.
  9. 1 2 Aldrich, John T. (June 1997). "Positive Theory and Voice and Equality". The American Political Science Review. 91 (2): 421–423. doi:10.2307/2952366. JSTOR   2952366. S2CID   148166361.
  10. 1 2 Roberts, Sam (13 March 2019). "Sidney Verba, innovative scholar of democracies, dies at 86". The New York Times. Retrieved 2 November 2019.
  11. ↑ Greenberg, Anna (Summer 2002). "Review: The Private Roots of Public Action: Gender, Equality, and Political Participation". The Public Opinion Quarterly. 66 (2): 309–311. doi:10.1086/340031.
  12. ↑ Randall, Vicky (September 2002). "Review: The Private Roots of Public Action. Gender, Equality and Political Participation". American Journal of Sociology. 108 (2): 499–500. doi:10.1086/376323.
  13. ↑ Stoker, Laura (1 January 2019). "Review: The Private Roots of Public Action: Gender, Equality, and Political Participation". Perspectives on Politics. 1 (3): 603–604. doi:10.1017/S1537592703480420. S2CID   147016101.
  14. ↑ Mikanagi, Yumiko (2003). "Book Reviews: The Private Roots of Public Action: Gender, Equality, and Political Participation". Japanese Journal of Political Science. 4 (1): 153–167. doi:10.1017/S1468109903211026. S2CID   145437956.
  15. ↑ Shapiro, Robert Y. (Autumn 2002). "Reviewed work: The Private Roots of Public Action: Gender, Equality, and Political Participation". Political Science Quarterly. 117 (3): 497–499. doi:10.2307/798270. JSTOR   798270.
  16. 1 2 Kim, Hannah June; Grofman, Bernard (2019). "The Political Science 400: With Citation Counts by Cohort, Gender, and Subfield". PS: Political Science & Politics. 52 (2): 296–311. doi: 10.1017/S1049096518001786 .
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.