- Welcome, I'm Eric Schickler,
Professor of Political Science,
at the University of California, Berkeley.
And on behalf of the Annual
Review of Political Science
Editorial Board, it's my pleasure
today to be here
interviewing Theda Skocpol.
Theda is the Victor S. Thomas Professor
of Government and Sociology
at Harvard University.
First, thank you, Theda, for...
- Thank you, Eric, it's really a pleasure
to be here with you.
- Great thanks.
I guess I want to start out with
a little bit about your background.
I know you were an undergraduate
at Michigan State University.
I guess I want to get a sense for
how that influenced your
intellectual development.
- Booyou we called it (laughs).
At Michigan State University is the huge
land grant university in
the state of Michigan.
I grew up in Michigan,
my parents were teachers
and my grandparents farmers
from different parts
of the state and there
was a tussle in my family.
My Mother wanted me to go to a small,
liberal arts college,
and study home economics.
And my Father, who was
a high school teacher,
was worried how much it was gonna
cost to send me to any college.
And so when I was admitted
to Michigan State University,
I got my Father on my
side because at that time,
it was certainly less
expensive in terms of tuition
and cost to go to the major
state university in Michigan.
I already knew what Michigan
State and east Lansing,
Michigan was like before I
tried to lobby my parents to
let me go to (laughs) one
particular college over another.
- Great, and so you
were a sociology major--
- I was.
- At Michigan State, what
brought you to sociology?
- Well, I was admitted into
an honors program there,
which meant that from the beginning,
I was part of a fairly
small group of students
within the tens of thousands
(laughs) at Michigan State,
who were allowed to put
together their own program.
So I had a lot of freedom,
sociology attracted me.
I had some charismatic
professors early on.
It just looked like a
social science discipline
where I could do a lot
of different things.
Where I would be free to move around.
And in retrospect, I think if I'd picked
political science, I
would have been slotted
into comparative or American
or theory or empiricism.
I could major in sociology
but not be too tied down
to any particular part of it,
and I could also take classes
in a lot of different
disciplines, which I did.
- So where there any particular authors
that influenced you especially
when you're studying
sociology at Michigan State?
- Well, by the time I was a senior,
I was in some small seminar type classes
with a man named James McKee,
he taught things like
Barrington Moore's books
and C. Wright Mills and I was very taken
with C. Wright Mills, I have to admit.
The whole argument that
you can marry the study
of empirics with history and
understand power dynamics.
We remember, this was the time of
the Civil Rights
Movement, the Vietnam War,
so I wanted to understand
real world things,
and I thought sociology,
particularly as practiced
by those giants was the way to do it.
- Great, you brought up the
political events of the 1960s.
So were you involved as an activist?
- (laughs) I was, I was, yes.
I was involved in the
anti-war movement, although,
I have to admit, I never
went as far as some people.
But I think the more important one
was the Civil Rights Movement.
I met my husband, and we
just celebrated our 50th
wedding anniversary
recently, last June of 2017.
I wouldn't have met him
necessarily at Michigan State
because he was a physics major from Texas.
And I was a sociology major from Michigan.
But we were both in the
Methodist Student Organization.
And at that time, the
leader of Methodist Student
Organization was very taken
by Martin Luther King,
who had come to speak
in Lansing, Michigan,
a year before we started
at Michigan State.
And that minister, and a couple
of other Methodist minsters,
talked themselves into the
idea that it would be great
to send a delegation of
Michigan State undergraduates
to Mississippi, to participate
in an education project
at an all black college in
Holly Springs Rust College.
And Bill and I were in the
Methodist Student group
that went, and that was a
life changing experience
because we didn't necessarily get involved
with any of the demonstrations
that led to violence
in Mississippi, because
you had to have your
parents permission to leave the campus.
And my parents would not give permission.
But we were in Mississippi
and we were teaching
English skills and math
skills to entering freshman
at Rust College, who were
the first people in their
often sharecropper
families to go to college.
So we saw, along with all
the other white students
from Michigan State who went down there,
we saw first hand what segregation
and racial oppression in
the pre-Civil Rights south
was like, and that was a life
changing experience, for sure.
- Right, so it's actually interesting
that you spent your academic career
at the most elite private universities,
Harvard and University of Chicago,
but you started out at
a big public university,
and had this formative
experience in Mississippi.
How do you think having that background
has affected your approach as a scholar?
- I think it keeps me grounded.
I have been at Harvard
University for a long time
and I was a graduate student here
and I love the place and I
think it is the embodiment
in many, many ways of excellence.
But I think it's very important
that I came from the
Midwest, and I never feel as
comfortable as when I am in the Midwest,
and I know what the vast heartland
of the country looks like and feels like.
My grandfather, who was a farmer
in Michigan on my Mother's
side, would have been
a tea party Republican
if he were still alive,
and so I have all those pictures
of my mind of those
kinds of relationships,
and that has helped me never
be taken in too far by the
elitist propaganda of a place
like Harvard University.
- Given your background,
given your interests,
your interest in real politics,
as well as learning about
society and politics.
How did you decide that academia
was where you wanted to go?
- Boy, that's a good question.
I feel as if I always wanted to be around
books and research and college.
I was very unpopular
as a young woman, girl,
in high school because I was
what was called, a brain.
That was not good in the big
high school that I went to.
It meant that you weren't
one of the popular ones
and people really wanted
to make your acquaintance
only when they wanted
to read your homework.
So I handled that by reading a lot.
And by the time I got to college,
I was still a very good student,
I was intrigued, I got involved in
some professors research
projects very early on,
and it's hard to go back into that time,
but people weren't as worried about
economic and careerist things then.
The major worry I remember
my soon to be husband
and I having, was how to
make sure he didn't get
shipped off to Vietnam War,
staying in college (laughs)
was a practical as well a logical thing.
But I think for me, I just liked it.
It was beginning to be possible
for women to have serious
careers, just beginning.
My teachers encouraged me to apply
for fellowships and I won them.
That made it possible to go to Harvard.
- So at Harvard, you mentioned
Barrington Moore's book
as an influence on you
as an undergraduate.
So I know that he was one
of your teachers at Harvard
though didn't actually end up
on your dissertation (laughs).
- No, he didn't.
- And so I want to hear
just a little bit about
what it was like to work
with or learn from Moore
and maybe a little bit
about that decision.
- Well, one of the first
things that happened
when I got to Harvard,
was that I found out that
Barrington Moore, who I
thought was a young radical,
I had read Social Origins of Dictatorship
and Democracy, well I found
out he was a crotchety,
18th century style (laughs),
fairly old fashioned
authoritarian in the classroom.
But he held a competition
to get into his seminar,
it was a seminar on theory,
so the first weekend
in graduate school at
Harvard, you had to write
an essay to get into this seminar.
And it was an essay of
what are the testable
propositions in the communist manifesto --
- Wow.
- And how (laughs) would
you go about testing them?
And Marxism was en vogue at that point.
So I wrote my essay, I got in.
He ran the thing with what he called,
the Socratic totalitarian method.
Which is he would throw out a
question about these readings,
which were almost impossible to do to.
We had to read Althusser
in French, for example--
- In French (laughs), oh my gosh.
- He doesn't make sense in English,
and in French it's even worse
if it's your second language.
So he would go around the table
until somebody said what he wanted
and then he would accept that answer.
But I came back for more,
after that first year,
I applied for the seminar
that was basically
Social Origins of
Dictatorship and Democracy
type seminar, and I loved that.
And that's where I learned to do the kinds
of things that led to my thesis
and book on the revolutions.
- It seems hard to imagine
a thesis more ambitious
than (laughs) Chinese, French
and Russian revolutions.
- Yeah, it was actually crazy (laughs).
- So what was the process
that led you to that project?
- Well it's important for
people to realize that at
that time, sociology was just
a very exciting discipline.
I was a sociologist, I
wasn't a political scientist
at that time, and I always
thought of myself as studying
politics and social
movements, among other things,
but I was a sociologist in my PHD program.
And there you had Seymour Martin Lipset,
you had Daniel Bell,
you had Tucker Parson's,
who died just as I was a
young graduate student,
but still, he was there and
his mark was on the department.
So these were sociologists
who thought big,
and wrote big, and to some degree,
they'd encouraged that
or at least allowed it
in some of their graduate students.
And I wrote a paper about revolutions,
I think it was for some intermediate step
in the process, drawing on what I learned
in Moore's seminar and
critiquing available theories.
And Daniel Bell read the paper,
and I can remember very clearly
sitting there in his office
and he said, "Well, this is
a thesis in the best sense
"of the word, why don't you do that?"
Now I glommed onto that, I
think I was a stubborn person,
and I thought, yep,
I've got an insight here
about how revolutions
work that it's different
from the theories that are out there.
And so I launched into
it, it almost killed me
because it was too big a project,
I almost didn't get it done in time.
But in the end, I had an
argument, I had an insight,
and I developed it about
two thirds of the way
in the PHD thesis and
I finally got it done.
And that turned out to
be a brilliant choice
because I had done something new
that I was passionate about
and that I could defend.
- So the thesis and
the book is an exercise
in comparative historical
research, right--
- It is.
- Which has become your Hallmark.
How did historians respond
to you in some sense
treading on their ground
in these canonical cases?
- Not well, not well, it was actually
pretty shocking for many historians.
They didn't understand
historical work in sociology
and political science, and
they did see it as treading
in their territory and
would particularly not
like it if you didn't know the language.
So I knew French, but I did
not know Russian and Chinese.
And I took a lot of flack for
that after the book came out.
Not so much while the
thesis was being developed,
because there were no
historians on the committee.
I was working with what I'd
learned from Barrington Moore,
taking advice from him, but
he wasn't on my committee.
Seymour Martin Lipset
was, he's somebody who had
already done comparative
historical work, he respected it.
And they understood that I was using
historians work to systematically develop
and test hypothesis at a secondary level.
After the book came out though,
it took a lot of pot shots
from historians in every field,
and I think the turning point
was at Berkeley, actually.
It was maybe a year out
or so and the Berkeley
History department
invited me to a colloquium
where I was gonna present
the thesis of the book,
and a historian of France,
a historian of Russia,
and a historian of China
was gonna criticize it.
And that happened, and
it was a packed room.
I don't remember where the room was,
but I know there were
hundreds of people there,
lots of historians, but I
demonstrated in the discussion
that I knew the work of the historians,
and that I knew the work
of the previous generations
of historians, and I came out
of that with their respect.
Not necessarily with
everybody agreeing, but people
understanding how I had used
the works of historians.
- So the book also has
had an enduring influence
in both sociology and political science.
Did you have political science in mind
as an audience when you were writing it?
- I don't think I cared about that at all.
I cared about understanding
the similarities
and differences and what had
happened in these revolutions
and what that set them apart from things
that weren't social revolutions.
So I was operating in the
Barrington Moore worldview,
and remember, Barrington
Moore was in some ways,
a political scientist
and sociologist both.
So was Seymour Martin Lipset.
He was in both disciplines, so in a way,
my chief mentors, intellectual
mentors in any of that,
were not people who particularly
respected disciplinary boundaries.
What they taught was ask a question,
and pursue the answers using the resources
and the methods of all disciplines.
I think I could have only
done this in sociology.
I think only sociology would have
allowed that boundary crossing.
I don't think political
science would have.
But it probably caught on more
in political science after it came out.
It came to be seen as a major
work in comparative politics.
- So a little later in the conversation,
I want to talk a bit more
about the current state
of political science,
but I wanted to ask now
about a project you did that was a
field building project
involving collaboration
with other sociologists that collimated
in the bringing the state back in volume.
And so I guess I want to
get a sense to what lead you
to that goal of trying to
build up a approach, a field,
that really did cross sociology
and political science?
- Well yeah, it's a good question in a way
because that's something that sets me
apart completely from Barrington Moore.
Barrington Moore never
was interested in building
anything inside academia or disciplines.
He thought disciplinary
politics was a waste of time.
He didn't even go to the
professional meetings.
By the time I was young
professor at Harvard,
I think I understood that
there was a need to work
with other young facility
who were beginning to
develop comparative historical methods.
But it was really Peter
Evans who came to me.
We only barely knew each other
because he had graduated from the Harvard
sociology department well
ahead of most of my time there.
He and Dietrich Rueschemeyer came to me
and said, let's try to create a...
I can't remember what it was called,
a working group at the Social
Science Research Council?
Social Science Research
Council was encouraging field
defining projects, and so
they were the ones that
drew me into it and we drew up a plan.
We really understood
that this book could help
to define a way of
thinking about the state
and society in politics that was new.
In some ways, it was very
old, went back to earlier era
of institutional political science.
By that time, I was at
the University of Chicago,
and I was in both sociology
and political science.
So I saw this as an intellectual project
in both disciplines, not just in one.
- And so some of these ideas get applied
in your work on the New Deal era
that you're working on at that time,
and I guess, maybe be your first foray
into American politics,
and what lead you to
decide to work on the New Deal?
- I never was one of these kinds
of scholars that picks a subject matter
and decides I'm gonna
work on that 'til death.
I was interested in puzzles about things
that happened in the real world.
And so after writing what I
had to say about the causes
and outcomes of social revolutions,
I then became interested
in this whole question
of reformism in democratic capitalism.
What were the sources of
that, both inside government
institutions and the
other part of bringing
the state back in, was thinking about
how organized social forces interact
with a particular institutional
structure of government.
So I was interested in those puzzles,
and the New Deal seemed like
a good way to think about it.
Because there were all kinds
of debates about what was the
driver of reform, and it's
limits, but I have to say,
my primary commitment has
always been to understand
the actual historical outcomes.
To understand the variations
over time and across cases.
And then the theoretical
gains are hopefully part
of that process, but I don't
sit down, read the APSR
and say, what's the next
squiggle in this theory,
or for that matter, the
American Sociological Review,
I don't do those things,
so I'm not theoretically
driven, I'm a theory user,
I use different theories
to try to understand real
world patterns and outcomes.
- Great, so this is also a
time when American political
development is starting to come into--
- It is.
- I know vogue might be too strong a word,
but becoming part of the
conversation at least.
Did you see yourself as--
- I did because Stephen Skowronek's book
had a big impact on me, I think I was
beginning to move from the New Deal to try
and understand the material
that would go into Protecting
Soldiers and Mothers, the
insights that the Civil War
pension system was a
defacto, early welfare state,
and these programs for mothers
and children at the turn of the...
And his book about the
evolution of patronage,
democracy and the United States
and it's transformation into
partially bureaucratized
states of the 20th century
was very influential.
The other big influence
was Marty Shefter's work,
and that explicitly comparative
because in the early phases of his career,
Shefter really outlined some ideas
that I think remain to this day
very powerful in thinking
about how the relative timing
of the bureaucratization of states
and the emergence of
mass political parties,
shapes the way in which interests
are organized into a nations politics.
So I just saw the United States as a place
where there were some
things I was noticing
using that perspective that
nobody else had noticed.
I'm always looking for
something that I might develop
that others have not already discovered,
because I like to be a little contrarian.
- So one, I think it's fair to say,
contrarian aspect of that book,
is this idea that Civil War pensions
were a form of social policy--
- You bet.
- And so how did you make that discovery?
- Boy, it really was a discovery,
because I was going to write
a book about the New Deal,
and about the shaping of
the modern welfare state
from the Social Security Act on,
that was the original plan (laughs),
that book has never been written.
I thought, well, maybe
if you're a historical
institutionalist, which
is how I was thinking
of myself by then because
I was political science
rather than in political sociology,
I thought, maybe you better go back
and look at the earlier period,
and I thought of it mainly in terms
of things that hadn't happened
in the progressive era,
the attempts to create an early
social insurance system
that were very important.
But I was reading one particular book,
I remember this very
clearly, it was the summer,
I was not at the University
of Chicago at that point.
I was in New Jersey for the summer,
and I read Isaac Max Rubinow's
Social Insurance book,
which was a brilliant, comparative study
of early social insurance
and social spending
and welfare systems,
dated 1913, I believe.
And I'm reading the book, and he says,
"The United States is spending more
"and covering more people
than any other country."
I thought, what can this man be saying,
how can he be saying that
at a time when we all know
the United States was
lagging and doing nothing.
So I read the chapter, and he was talking
about Civil War pensions, he
was talking about the amount
of spending, the proportion
of the population covered
the generosity of the old age benefits
and disability benefits
compared to Germany
and England at the time,
and I thought, wow,
and just noticing that, set
me off on an investigation
into what these were and
then I started asking why.
How could this happen, and
that's where I could marry
it to some of the
insights that were coming
from Skowronek's work
and Shefter's work about
how patronage politics worked,
and particularly about the
impact of the Civil War
on American state
building, which I actually
don't think Skowronek says enough about.
But that's the Tilly influence once again,
that comes out of my comparative politics,
understanding that war is a major driver
of state formation and so if
you're gonna believe that,
then you have to ask, well,
what wars has America fought?
And it turns out that the
biggest one was about itself.
- So one of the other
things that books noted
for I think is this shift or apparent
shift to a polity focused approach.
How big a shift was that actually?
Do you feel like in some ways your
early work already had that or is it--
- Yeah, it did, because if you go back
to Bringing the State Back In,
we talked not just state autonomy,
but about how the institutions
of a political system
can shape the ways in which
political alliances form
and the ways in which social
groups understand their
interests, and we call that
the Tolgolian side of things,
rather than the Vabarian
or the Autohensa side.
I felt a new term was
needed, and I'm kind of weary
about terms, I'm not a discourse analyst,
but it was clear at that
point that people were taking
state senate as meaning
state as the only actor.
And since that's never what was meant,
I wanted a term that would
enable me to reemphasis
that both strands have to
be involved in the analysis,
you have to ask, how
bureaucratic is the state,
how independent is the resource
base, are there communities
of officials like Dan Carpenter
studies that have their own
world view and their own
capacity to act together,
that's state autonomy, it's
a variable, it's not a given.
And then you have to ask
well what is the pattern
of the party system and
the institutional structure
of representation or authority,
and how does that privilege
some kinds of social groups
and demands versus others.
And so both of those entered into
the analysis in Protecting
Soldiers and Mothers.
- So Theda, a lot of your
recent work has drawn on
historical materials and
other kinds of data collection
efforts to study really
contemporary problems in American
politics, so I want to talk
a little bit about that.
Maybe start with the
work on civil engagement.
What lead you to that topic
and also if you could talk a
little about the distinctive
approach in terms of building
these new data sets that
you took on in that work.
- Well, there are different philosophies
that I think scholars
have in their careers.
Some develop an important insight
and elaborate on it through
their entire career.
And there are some advantages to that,
we could think of people
who've done that very well.
My approach is very, very different.
The real world, and to some
degree academic debates,
throw up issues, and I get
curious about explaining
something or I think I've
got a better way to explain
something other people are arguing about,
and I try to move on to a
new substitutive question
about new changes in history,
new ways in which government
politics and society
interact, those are all there,
but a new one, to explore
the next set of questions.
So sometimes people say, how
do you get from revolutions
to studying volunteer
groups in American history?
Well, they're all puzzles
about how organized political
action unfolds and to what
end, and what shapes it.
So in the case of the
civic engagement work,
it was really the birth of the
whole social capital debate
that my colleague, Bob Putnam, launched.
He's the sociologist in the pair,
I'm the political scientist (laughs),
he started in political science
and I started in sociology.
We're good friends and we work
on a lot of the same things,
but he was launching the
whole social capital thing
and he was treating in mainly in terms
of individual attitudes
and local social networks.
And I was coming off the
work on Protecting Soldiers
and Mothers, and I was
aware from that work,
that from the 19th century
on, they were vast voluntary
associations in the field
in the United States.
By vast I mean millions of
people across the whole country,
hundreds of thousands to millions,
operating organizationally
at the national state
and local level, I knew
that because I'd studied
the Veterans Organizations,
like the Grand Army of the
Republic, and the women's groups
like the Women's Christian
Temperance Union and the National Congress
of Mothers that became the PTA.
So while he was introducing
the idea that it was all local
and interpersonal and
suggesting an image of change
in the United States,
where you go from the local
and interpersonal to the national,
I realized that that's not right.
So out of that came an
effort to launch a new study.
I assembled a team of
students and we set out to do
something that I thought at
first would be easy (laughs),
which is to assemble a list
of all the large voluntary
membership groups, apart
from churches and political
parties, that had already every existed
in the United States from the revolution
to the present, the present then was 1990.
Well, there was no source for this,
there was no data set, there was no way
to look it up on a
computer, there was no list,
so what we had to do is
just read history books
and try to identify large
numbers of organizations
that might have, we decided
they had to have enrolled 1%
of the adult population as
members, and that took years
to come up with what was
ultimately a list of 58 groups.
Well, that was just an absolutely
fascinating project, I have to say.
It took detective work, it took ingenuity,
it took me into one of my great hobbies,
which is going through
antique malls looking
for old reports, we met old men
and woman maintaining archives
of groups that were on their death bed.
We just had a great time and it generated
an amazing set of data that
are about organizations,
not about individuals, the
social capital literature
was analyzing to death
the general social survey
from the 1970s to the present to get
all these individual answers
from national surveys.
Well, you can't do that
if you wanna understand
American's organizational
affiliations before the 1970s,
which is exactly what we wanted to do.
So we figured out a way to
find organizational records
that gave membership numbers,
that gave the numbers
of local units and state units
in these federated groups,
and eventually wrote journal
articles as well as books that
tracked the way in which, I think uniquely
in the United States of America,
vast federated membership associations
that were voluntarily
created and expanded,
shaped a lot of civic life and politics,
from the period around the Civil War,
coming into their own after the Civil War,
through the mid twentieth century,
and then came many of them to a fairly
abrupt decline from the 1960s up.
So the last part of the research
was why that last decline
happened, which actually
left, as I put it,
Americans with more
organizations but fewer members.
And with organizations, they
either operated just nationally
or just locally rather
than the kinds of things
that bridge those levels in the past.
That project was historical curiosity
and really using every
conceivable method we could use,
we, the students and I,
to find the data sources,
and to code them systematically.
- A lot of your work
is focused on the rise
of the conservative movement,
the movement of Republicans
to the right, and so one
piece of that is your book
on the Tea Party, and
project on the Tea Party.
And among other things,
that involved field work,
which (laughs)--
- It did, a brand new method for me.
- And not just field work, but field work
of a Harvard professor
with all the assumptions
that go with that, and
Tea Party conservatives,
so talk a little bit
about that experience.
How you were able to get
access to these individuals,
and gain enough trust to
do this kind of research
and what you learned from it.
- Well, that's another project that
grew out of just plain curiosity.
Let's go back to the first two years
of the Obama presidency,
I'm a political scientist,
a number of us were studying that,
and ended up writing about that,
but there was also this Tea
Party thing that emerged
and it was pretty obviously a big deal
because it was involving a
lot of people dressing up in
colonial costumes and going
out to demonstrations (laughs),
and it was affecting Republicans,
it was obviously causing
them to just say no to
Obama, to unleash many
of the forces that have now come
to fruition eight years later.
Well, both Vanessa Williamson,
who at that time, was a graduate student
in government at Harvard,
and I were curious about it.
And I want to underline
that we were curious.
We really didn't know what this thing was.
And we spent absolutely no
time on definitional arguments.
A lot of other people were
saying, well is it a social
movement or is it a AstroTurf
movement where rich people
are just creating something for show,
and we just brushed all that aside
and decided we're gonna
use every empirical method
known to political science
as quickly as we can.
But then we realized, you
gotta do more than that.
So Vanessa actually had gotten
to know the Tea Party leader
in eastern Massachusets and
had attended some meetings.
I realized that I was arguing
politically with somebody
online who was a member of
the Tea Party in Virginia,
so we hatched this idea
that we're gonna try to go
and have face to face
meetings with grass roots
Tea Party people, ultimately,
we documented with some
Harvard undergraduates, that
were about 900 Tea Parties
formed all over the United
States, voluntary groups,
what were these groups,
we didn't know that
and really wasn't expected
because we had earlier concluded
that most American civic life
was not based on face to face
meetings at the local
level connected to national
things anymore so this seemed new.
We used every device we
could figure out to get
into a personal conversation
with Tea Party people,
and convince them that we
would treat them with respect,
that we just wanted to
come and hear their story,
and sometimes it didn't work.
For example, if you google me
you find out very quickly that
I'm a liberal intellectual,
in my citizen capacity,
but I had relationships
that I cultivated in Virginia,
mostly by just convincing
people that there was a
difference between researched
politics, that we were learning,
I remember telling the guy
I was arguing with, we're
learning from the Massachusets
Tea Partiers, but we know
we need to talk to Tea Party
people in another part of the country,
and he writes back and he says,
"Well those are a bunch of rhinos."
(laughs)
Which is their term for...
And he talked his local Tea
Party into letting us come down
there by saying, their liberals,
but they're not so bad.
I think the lesson I learned
from that, apart from the fact
that you can just learn so
much from talking to political
actors, non elite political
actors, face to face,
because they'll tell you their story.
They told us how they got
to know the Tea Party,
how they formed local
groups, these are structural
questions, but we just
said, tell us how you heard
about the Tea Party, we're
impressed that you're active,
which is true, didn't lie,
tell us how that happened.
And that is a lesson that I now teach many
of my undergraduate
students, who are going out
and doing field work, don't be afraid.
You may be able to talk to
conservative people as long as
you can get into a situation
where they don't think you're
trying to lord it over them
and you're prepared to listen.
I think a lot of times people in academia,
assume that everybody out there
is gonna hate us no matter what,
it's a little bit a matter
of treating them like they're
adults and explaining the
distinction that you make,
and then some will accept
that and some won't,
but that's no different from
any realm of life, right?
- So if it's possible to have
a more controversial subject
to study than the Tea Party,
it might be the Koch brothers.
(laughs)
- I haven't talked to the Koch brothers.
I don't think they would.
- So they hear you're
trying to study a network
of consortium of super wealthy donors,
where it seems like what they
thrive on is most is secrecy,
so how do you go about trying to study
that and getting leverage on that?
- Well, once again, I put
together a research group
and in this case, we
realized there was a lot of
muckraking journalism out
there, and if you simply went
through all the journalistic
sources left and right,
and put together databases
on what they claimed,
a lot of times journalists are pretty
creative at ferreting things out.
In the case of the Koch seminars,
these are these right wing
millionaires and billionaires,
that have built up an entire network
that's captured the Republican party,
it's economic policies
anyway, it's tax policies.
The things that have just passed,
in the first year of the Trump
presidency, are Koch dreams.
The dismantling of the
Environmental Protection Agency,
the privatization of public education,
all of these are things that
these organized millionaires
and billionaires on the right
have been preparing to get
Congress and state legislatures
to do for a long time.
Once again, the principle
is organizational analysis.
Everybody else out there is
saying it's a question of money.
Money matters in politics,
but how money is spent matters
more, so we don't have perfect
data on how much money each
millionaire or billionaire
is giving to either
the right or the left,
it's just not there,
and it's never going to
be, but what we could do,
is discover the
organizations that are part
of the Koch universe that
channels money to other
organizations and the liberal millionaires
and billionaires in the democracy alliance
channel money to other organizations.
So we build up databases
of those organizations,
we look at their budgets
and we look at the people
who are leading them,
and then we figure out,
where did those people come from,
and where are they going to?
So let me give you an example.
One of the issues about the Koch network
is that the Koch brothers themselves,
Charles and David,
didn't like Donald Trump.
(laughs)
So they did not endorse him for president,
and for some people that's
evidence that there's a split.
Well, funny thing is, once Donald Trump
the presidency, which nobody
really thought he was going to,
the Koch network had
lots of people to offer
to be installed in his administration,
and he didn't have his own so he took 'em.
And because we had studied the building up
of those organizations,
and the careers of people,
we knew exactly who he was plugging in
and what they were bringing with that.
You can't hide the
people, and even something
as simple as the Wayback
Machine on the internet,
or LinkedIn biographies,
will give you data
on the movement of people,
and that's in some ways
even better than the movement of money.
- So you mentioned Donald Trump (laughs),
hard not to mention Donald Trump.
Can you talk a little bit about
your current research on Trump voters?
- The earlier work that is still ongoing,
we call it the Shifting Train Project
and that's the work where
we're trying to understand
how things have been reorganized
on the right and left,
and we discovered the
growth of this Koch network
that is not just big money
donors but organizations
that can mobilize activists,
and money, at the state
and local level as well
as the national level,
so that helps us understand
why the Republican party
has become so enamored of
big tax cuts for the rich,
getting rid of health
care through Obamacare,
ideally, if they get their way, eventually
dismantling social security and Medicare.
These are not popular ideas,
standard political science
that says that elected
politicians only do what voters
want is just not gonna
explain where that comes from.
So our work on these donor
networks and the organizations
they've built, help us understand that.
But along comes Donald Trump in 2016,
and that threw off yet
another challenge that would
have to be understood because all right,
he really was not endorsed
by the Koch network.
Charles and David Koch didn't like him,
they didn't think he was gonna win,
hardly anybody thought he was gonna win,
we can draw on the earlier
work to understand a lot
of what happens after
Trump becomes elected
and becomes president, but
it still doesn't really
help us understand what's
going on at the local level
in the way that the Tea Party
work helped eight years ago.
So after the election was over,
it was really just days after,
three professors here at Harvard,
Mary Waters in the sociology department,
somebody I teach with,
she studies immigration.
Kathy Swartz, who's an economist, and me,
with this history of studying
these social movements
and civic groups and
organizations in politics.
We decided that we would, once again,
go out there and find out what's going on,
and we dreamed up this idea
of taking two counties apiece
in Pennsylvania and North
Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin,
that voted for Trump, and
getting to know them very well
over a two to four year period.
In some ways, it's similar
to the Tea Party work
but it's broader because
the idea was to go into
these counties, we
literally travel to them.
We're not so much talking to voters,
we can't conduct surveys,
what we're doing instead is
talking to the key leaders of
local institutions and groups.
So newspaper editors, business
leaders and top employers,
the leaders of the healthcare
system because healthcare is
important is all of these counties.
The idea is to see how
the debates in Washington
and the Trump presidency
play down on the ground
and how that changes over time.
To my surprise, there
turned out to be anti-Trump
resistance movements,
grass roots movements like
the Tea Party but on the center left,
organized in all of these counties,
even though they're quite
conservative places in some cases.
So it's fascinating work
and in a way for me,
it allows me to put
together what's happening
on the ground with the more national
study of the organizations changing
on the left and right nationally.
So for example, it really
turns out that just
like the first two years
of Obama's presidency,
was a period of effervescence
on the grass roots right,
with Tea Parties forming
outside the Republican party,
but able to pressure it and change it.
We're in a period right now
that there are thousands
of local, indivisible, or
other kinds of anti-Trump
resistance groups forming,
pretty spontaneously
at the local level, outside
the Democratic party
for the most part, but
likely to change what
the Democratic party is doing
locally and maybe nationally.
These are similar
moments, where a president
and Congress takes office,
determined to change
the countries direction, and
citizens on the opposite side
say, wait a minute, that's
not what I want for America!
And they organize, but the
larger counties project
will involve things like
talking to the business people,
who in many places say,
that their biggest problem
in getting workers is
due to the opioid crisis.
Or the healthcare system,
what are they grappling
with in a period where the
signals from Washington
and the states are changing constantly?
And what happens when
immigration restrictions are put
on in counties outside of big
cities that need more people?
And in some cases, have
immigrant groups working
in agriculture in those counties.
So those are the kinds of
things, it's very bottom up,
not so much man in the
street, but local leaders.
And then identifying the puzzles
that are playing out in this period.
Probably a white several
different kinds of things,
we're just grappling with that.
It's been a big effort
just to visit these places.
It takes two or three days at
each to get know them at all.
But I don't use interviews
for individual reduction
as purposes, I use them to
get a sense of how people
see the lay of the land,
who they're relating to,
in the case of a new indivisible
type resistance movement,
I wanna know, how'd you form,
how'd you meet the other
people here, and the interview,
I think sometimes it's hard
for social scientist to understand
this, an interview can be
a source of structural data,
and what ties my work together
is the interest in organizations.
- So speaking of organizations,
so one of your innovations
in recent years has been the formation
of the Scholars Strategy Network,
and so I wanted to see if you could
talk a little bit about why you did
and what you see it's purpose
is being, it's goals as being?
- Well, first of all, it's not just me.
There's a whole group of
actually largely political
scientists, but political
scientists of the same ilk
that don't care that much
about disciplinary boundaries,
and we formed it in 2009,
really figured out what we were
doing in 2011, and the
idea is to have a national
federated organization on the grounds that
having a presence in regions and local
and states is important
in American public life.
And the idea is to take the
riches of ideas and policy
relevant knowledge that
exists in America's colleges
and universities and do a
better job of translating
it into things that can
influence public discussions
and that can get facts and
ideas to policy makers.
If you step back and you
look at American politics
of the last 50 years, there
really has been a collapse
of the bridges between the universities
and public life, and probably
many people would say,
well that's because the right
has attacked universities.
It's deeper than that because
I think as American academia
grew into the worlds most
magnificent array of colleges,
universities, and research programs,
and that's what happened in
the post World War II period.
It also became very
specialized and ingrown so that
academics in one part of
the university have no idea
what others are even talking about,
and at the same time, the
bridges fell down between many
of those specialties and Washington DC,
state capitals, and that's on both sides.
So the idea here was to
create a membership group,
comes out of my work on
membership associations,
structural insight, and allow
academics without quitting
their day jobs, without going
to work for a think tank,
without going to Washington
or a state capital
to join this and translate their work into
two page briefs written in plain English.
That we then use to help
people write out bids,
to form ties to civic
associations for example,
voting researchers,
we've connected with them
with the League of Women
Voters, and some of our members
have gone and spoken at their conventions,
and handed our two pages that summarize
in everyday language without dumbing down,
the results of sophisticated
research projects,
and we now have, I think it's
now 30 some chapters growing,
all over the country, and
deliberately outside just
the liberal areas, powerful
chapter in Oklahoma,
one in Georgia, one in Utah,
a really vibrant one in Utah,
and with a little bit of help they
can weave ties to even
Republican legislatures
in many places, and they have done so.
- So I want to talk a little
bit more about academia,
and life in academia,
and so one facet of that
has to do with gender and
being a woman in academia,
and so I wanted to maybe
start out to get your sense,
what was it like first
as a graduate student,
and then assistant professor at Harvard?
- It was great as a graduate student
because I came to graduate
school at the time
of the Vietnam War, so
actually the gender balance
had suddenly changed (laughs).
- Anginous shock.
- Suddenly, at least in
the sociology department,
I think I arrived just
at the time they stopped
counting graduate study for deferment.
So it was 40% female,
ultimately, some of us went back
and did a study for that
Harvard sociology department
and discovered that women
had always been in the PHD
program, they just
hadn't gotten jobs after
they were finished, it was exciting
because women were newly assertive.
There was the feminist movement,
which we were holding these meetings
and engaging in gripes and
then doing things about it,
and suddenly departments
were deciding they needed
to hire a woman, usually it was a woman.
That's how I got hired as
an assistant professor.
So it was a moment when
everything seemed possible.
Everybody got over that
pretty fast, though.
Because I would say that
by the time my generation
of the first feminist generation,
modern feminist generation
was into jobs, which was an
achievement in of itself.
It became obvious that it was
not gonna be easy to move up.
And it wasn't easy for me,
I ended up being turned down
for tenure at Harvard at a
time when admittedly it was
hard for a rising assistant
professors to get tenure,
associate professors, as I was.
But I had just written
a book that had won the
top award in the field,
I was being offered
jobs in all the leading departments,
I was voted down in a tie
vote in my department.
I reacted to that by
filing the first grievance
that had been filed inside Harvard
University about gender discrimination.
- And that grievance to my
understanding is it took quite
some time to be resolved (laughs)--
- It took a very long time
to be resolved, yeah, yeah.
- Eventually it was reversed
and after being in Chicago
for a period you came back
to Harvard, could you talk
a little bit, how did that
affect your career, life--
- Well it was great to go to
the University of Chicago,
I have to say, the University of Chicago
is a very special place then and now,
it is a great university,
of course, we all know that.
But it's a university that doesn't really
respect disciplinary boundaries very much.
It was founded by German
Jews and it values argument.
It's the only university
I've ever been where
I've been invited to speak
in an economics department,
now admittedly, so they could
tell me why it was wrong,
but it's just taken for
granted, and so I was recruited
there actually by William
Julius Wilson in sociology
and Ira Kevelson in political science
and I was given a joint appointment.
I probably wouldn't have
gotten that offer if it had
been after my grievance
was filed at Harvard.
The truth of the matter is that you file
a grievance, you're a marked woman.
- Even though they were
gonna hire you with tenure,
just the sheer fact that you were
challenging Harvard at that time?
- Yeah, I think it would have been
enough to stop it in most places.
But I had the offers in hand
before I filed the grievance,
not just from Chicago but from elsewhere.
So I went to Chicago even though
my husband did not get a job there.
He was a physicist working in New Jersey,
but I decided that that's the place
I wanted to be and so I commuted,
it was a hard way to live,
but I loved the University of Chicago,
it was a great place to be,
I was there for five years.
Finally, after I refused
to let Harvard off the hook
in resolving my grievance,
they wanted me to quit,
I'm not going to quit, wouldn't
quit, wouldn't let 'em,
they had to decide, I told
them they had to decide.
And they finally did decide,
they brought me back.
And I came back because my husband, Bill,
got a job at Boston University,
otherwise, I might not have
left Chicago, I really loved it.
And I was treated very
badly at Harvard for
the first five years, there's
just no question about it.
The fact that I'd won a
grievance with a presidential
appointment was held against me, for sure.
- And so did that end
up playing into the move
from sociology, I mean,
I guess you came back--
- Yeah, I came in sociology and government
at that time was what we call
political science at Harvard,
would not accept me,
and that was obviously
because since I'd been a
member of the political science
department at Chicago, and
by then, increasingly thought
of myself as a political scientist
as well as a sociologist,
they made a conscious
decision and it was directly related
to the grievance, no
question, people said so.
But I learned after a little
while to just settle down
and do my work, work with
students, I learned to stop
arguing with people, which is hard for me.
(laughs)
I'd just stopped arguing and
I decided that my approach
to the political science
department at Harvard would be
to go to colloquial and get to
know people, always flatter,
that's very, very difficult for me.
But I did learn that
flattery is important.
Especially since, if you've
been appointed at a university
after a protest over gender,
you're virtually seen
as a witch, at least you
were back then, I was.
I was blamed for things
I didn't even know about.
So it was definitely a
witch craft type thing.
So I finally realized, just
calmed down and I realized,
look, if you're gonna make your way here,
you have to work with students,
which is my great pleasure,
it always has been, do your scholarship,
so those that are hoping
you'll never do anything good
again, I was working on
Protecting Soldiers and Mothers,
it took a long time, but it
ended up being a magnificent
accomplishment when it
was finally finished,
and you need to just go to things.
I got elected to the faculty council,
that was outside sociology,
I went to political science
colloquial and I just smiled
at people and cooperated
and established the reputation
as a constructive person,
and so that meant that eventually,
when Protected Soldiers
and Mothers came out
and won the top award
in political science,
my supporters in the department
who were always there,
brought it up for a vote, I think the
third time and it passed.
- Wow.
- And so I more or less
moved into the government
department where I've been
quite happily ever sense.
And by now it's all
over, it took 15 years,
but it's all fine, people
who were very angry
at me in the past are no longer angry.
I have good relationships
with just about everyone
involved in this drama
who's still with us,
and I think my time at
Harvard has been good,
overall, after a bad stretch.
- So how do you think for
women now in academia,
say assistant professors or
advanced graduate students,
what lessons should they
take from this history
in thinking about their own
challenges in situation?
- Well it is different
now, there are many more
women in academia now,
certainly in political science.
I can remember attending political
science meetings where
it was all guys in suits.
(laughs)
It just was, long after
it wasn't sociology,
but now I think these disciplines
are much more diverse,
I'm not saying they're
in any perfect place,
because we know that's not true.
I think my generation of
women who were high achievers
who were denied things
and fought about it,
were on their own in many ways.
And that's kind of scary
because you do dumb things
when you're on your own,
I definitely did at times
when I was scared, so
I don't think you have
to be scared now, you
can network with others.
Then my broader list is really
for all graduate students,
regardless of gender,
race or anything else,
make sure you pick a
project for your PHD thesis
and then your graduate studies
that you really care about,
and don't let people tell you
you have to do X to get a job,
or to get anything, first
of all, it's not true.
There are older people
who are telling you about
the world they came out of,
not the one you're headed into.
You will be well served if
you figure out the answers
to a puzzle that you think is
important and can convey that.
That's what I did with my
thesis, and was it dangerous?
Yes, it was, but it would
have been even more dangerous
to do something I was
bored to tears about,
and it wouldn't have opened doors.
So I do think graduate
students now are more afraid,
and I don't think they should be.
- So that brings us to
the contemporary state
of political science, so your
work has always been motivated
by big suspensive questions,
that have theoretical stakes
and often real world,
practical implications.
And I think the criticism
that's made about political
science by many people today,
is that we're asking narrower
and narrower questions, hoping
that we can nail down some
cause or effective, some
treatment or manipulation,
but often disconnected to
theory or real world stakes.
So I wanted to get your sense,
does that resonate with you?
- I think the important
thing is not to be captured
by any one given method
or school of thought.
And really, at least graduate
students who are leading
programs like Berkeley or
Harvard, can easily avoid capture.
All these major departments
have faculty who are working
in a variety of ways and excellent ways,
who generally respect each other,
students need to realize
that they are agents.
They can make decisions
about what their passionate
about and they can put together
the faculty committees,
even play faculty against each other.
(laughs)
Every time I go, when I'm in
a department, they'll say,
well the graduate students
would like to meet with you,
and I kick the faculty out of the room.
And I say look, this is how you should
approach your faculty, listen
to them, learn from them,
but don't let anybody capture you.
Now there are certainly people
in all of our departments,
we won't use names, who
are trying to capture.
Who are trying to say,
I'm the only way forward.
This particular technique for figuring
out causality is the only one.
Learn from 'em, and don't listen to that.
If you're somebody who cares
about substantive questions,
recognize that multiple sources of dated,
multiple methodological
approaches are the way to go.
And maybe this is the one
daring thing I would say,
recognize that a good enough
answer to an important
question, important both
substantively in the field
and in the real world, is more value
than a definite answer
to a trivial question.
There is a fair amount
happening in political
science that's wandering off into trivia.
I don't think political
science for example,
had an inkling about the
Donald Trump election.
I think the book that Vanessa Williamson
and I wrote about the Tea Party offered
more insight into the
populous, nativist sources
of his support than all of
the number crunching models,
all of which predicted, that he would not,
and I'm not saying I
predicted he would win,
I did not, but the truth is,
I never said he wouldn't win.
I never did because our
research that grew out of that
study, multi-method study of
the Tea Party, had made me
aware of the depth of popular
anger on nativist grounds.
- So the last question I
want to ask you about is,
when we were talking before,
you sort of mentioned
your American identity,
your love of America
and traveling around America,
and I guess it's sort
of unusual for a quote
unquote, elite academic
to express that sentiment (laughs)--
- It is, it is indeed.
- I guess I just wanted
you to reflect how that
affects your life as an
academic or how we should
think about that in relation
to your work and career.
- Well I'm definitely not a citizen
of the world, I would not say that.
Of course, I enjoy international travel
and do a fair amount of it,
but I guess it's my age,
it's my fascination and
love for American history,
my sense that this has been
one of the most special
countries in world history
because of our ability
to weave together people
from all over the world.
It's a cosmopolitan way
of understanding America,
that's why I don't sleep
through the night very well
in the Trump era, because
I agree with the point
that many have made that
what America is is at stake
in this period and I have a lot
of faith in most American's,
including some who voted for Donald Trump,
that that's not really what they want
for the future of this country.
And I think this is a wonderful country,
I hope it makes it through a rough patch,
and is able to renew the vitality
of a immigrant receiving country,
innovative with at least historically,
an ability to marry individual initiative
and social responsibility, we just need
to find a new way to do
that in a different world.
I am unabashedly an American patriot,
there's just no question about it.
- All right, well, thank you, Theda,
so much for this tremendous conversation.
- Thank you.
