Skocpol Wins Political Science Prize

Theda Skocpol, the outgoing dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, is this year’s recipient of the highest international honor for political scientists.

The committee that awards the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science honored Skocpol, the Thomas professor of government and sociology, “for her visionary analysis of the significance of the state for revolutions, welfare, and political trust, pursued with theoretical depth and empirical evidence.”

Skocpol will travel to Uppsala University in Sweden to receive the prize, including about $72,000 in cash, on Sept. 29.

“I’m delighted to have won the award,” Skocpol said. “It signifies the impact that my ideas and my research have had not just in the United States, but also internationally.”

In the past 30 years, Skocpol has delved into a wide variety of political fields ranging from international politics involving the causes of revolutions and peasant revolts to domestic issues pertaining to public policy and American civic life.

Robert D. Putnam, last year’s Skytte Prize winner and the Malkin professor of public policy, said that her work emphasized the influence of the state on political life—an issue that had been largely ignored when scholars took more psychological and sociological approaches to political science.

“She has transformed the way that political scientists looked at all these problems,” Putnam said. “She brought the state back into a central position in political science.”

Skocpol’s research in the structure of civic society has brought new insights into the “nature of organizations that influence the government” and “the whole underpinning of American democracy,” Sidney Verba ’53, the 2002 Skytte Prize winner and the Pforzheimer University Professor, said.

According to Robert O. Keohane, the 2005 Skytte Prize winner and an international science professor at Princeton, Skocpol’s insights not only transformed how political scientists viewed domestic affairs, but also revolutionized how scholars approached international politics. Her work in state development and revolution “intimately linked” comparative politics to world politics, which had previously been considered to be separate fields.

“It’s one of the most important changes in the way that these subjects are studied in the last 25 years, and Skocpol’s work is absolutely fundamental to that change,” Keohane said. “In a sense, she probably deserves it two times over.”

Having authored 10 books, nine edited collections, and more than 80 articles, with another book on American political transformations in the works, Skocpol said that her scholarship isn’t yet complete.

“My philosophy is to tackle problems that matter in the real world,” Skocpol said. “My thing is to move from one topic to another, and I think I will continue to do that in the future.”