Paul Pierson is the director of the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative and the John Gross Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. He also serves as the co-director of the multi-university Consortium on American Political Economy (CAPE).
His research, which focuses on the American political economy and public policy, has been awarded several major prizes from the American Political Science Association. He is the author or co-author of seven books, including the best-selling Winner Take All Politics, one of four books he has written with Jacob Hacker. His latest book, with Eric Schickler, is Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era.
Pierson is a regular commentator on public affairs, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, and Foreign Affairs. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Pierson is a former Guggenheim Fellow, Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, and Russell Sage Foundation Fellow. He also served as co-director of the Successful Societies Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR).
December 27, 2023
In a December 2023 article for the journal Perspectives on Politics, BESI director Paul Pierson and his co-authors argue that the Democratic Party has assembled its "U-shaped" coalition by formulating an increasingly bold economic program — not by appealing to culture and identity, as is often suggested.