Kay Schlozman
J. Joseph Moakley Professor of Political Science Kay L. Schlozman is the first woman to be selected for the American Political Science Association’s Warren E. Miller Lifetime Achievement Award, which honors an outstanding career of intellectual accomplishment and service to the profession in the field of elections, public opinion, and voting behavior.
APSA is the leading professional organization for the study of political science, with more than 13,000 members from more than 80 countries. Warren E. Miller, the award’s namesake and its inaugural winner, was a pioneering political scientist best known as the co-author of the groundbreaking book, The American Voter, one of the first comprehensive studies to use survey data to understand how voters think and act.
Other Miller Lifetime Achievement Award winners have included Philip E. Converse, who, along with Miller, was a co-author of The American Voter and an innovative figure in the field of public opinion, survey research, and quantitative social science; Robert Putnam, whose works include Bowling Alone and Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis; and Larry Bartels, author of Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.
“I am in awesome company as a recipient of the Miller Lifetime Achievement Award,” said Schlozman, a faculty member since 1974 who is a widely hailed expert on citizen participation in American politics. “I am very grateful and humbled by the honor.”
Schlozman has received multiple honors from APSA: the Samuel J. Eldersveld Career Achievement Award, which recognizes a scholar whose lifetime professional work has made an outstanding contribution to the field of political organizations and parties; the Rowman and Littlefield Award for innovative teaching in political science; and the Frank J. Goodnow Award for distinguished service to the political science profession. She also shared the APSA Philip E. Converse Book Award with long-time collaborators Sidney Verba—another Miller Lifetime Achievement Award recipient—and Henry Brady for Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism and American Politics, and the Victoria Schuck Award with Nancy Burns and Sidney Verba for their co-authored book, The Private Roots of Public Action: Gender, Equality, and Political Participation.
Appointed as the University’s first Moakley Professor in 2002, Schlozman researches broad areas of American political life, parties and elections, interest groups, voting and public opinion, political movements, money in politics, and the gender gap in citizen political activity. She is the co-author of six books, including her latest with Verba and Brady, the recently released Unequal and Unrepresented: Political Inequality and the People’s Voice in the New Gilded Age. She is also the editor of Elections in America and co-editor with Gary King and Norman Nie of The Future of Political Science.
Looking back, Schlozman said, exposure to Miller’s work piqued her interest in political science, although she wasn’t aware of it at first.
“When I learned about the Constitution as a junior in high school, I naively asked my history teacher, ‘Are the people we elect supposed to do what we want them to do, or are they supposed to do what they think is best?’ Turns out that is a question with which political philosophers have grappled for generations.”
Schlozman, however, started out as an English major during her undergraduate years at Wellesley College. “Then I took a sociology course, and it was clear I understood how to think as a social scientist, so I became a double sociology/English major. And I got ‘A’s in everything except English.”
As she took courses related to her sociology major, including in economics, Schlozman found “that I kept gravitating toward questions with political dimensions. Later on, as I continued to explore political science as a discipline of choice, I encountered the classic article in which Miller and his co-author, Donald Stokes, subjected to the light of data the question of how members of Congress represent the policy views of their constituents. I was fascinated.
“I feel very fortunate to have been able to work with many talented colleagues over the years to address such issues, which are critical to understanding the state of our democracy.”
She received the award at the annual APSA meeting in Boston in September.
—Sean Smith | University Communications | September 2018