Lawrence R. Jacobs


Lawrence R. Jacobs is an American political scientist and founder and director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. He was appointed the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs in 2005 and holds the McKnight Presidential Chair. Jacobs has written or edited, alone or collaboratively, 16 books and over 100 scholarly articles in addition to numerous reports and media essays on American democracy, national and Minnesota elections, political communications, health care reform, and economic inequality. In 2020, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Early life

Jacobs was born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. His father, Henry Jacobs, served in the U.S. Army and worked in New York City as a stenographer, opening his own firm. His mother, Judy Jacobs, was a registered nurse.
Jacobs graduated from Oberlin College in 1981 with a B.A. in History and English and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in political science in 1990.

Career as researcher

Recurring topics in Jacobs' research include American democracy, health care reform, political communications, and central banking.

American democracy

Jacobs' first book, The Health of Nations, and related studies identified the political and institutional conditions that explain why two broadly similar countries – the U.S. and Britain – designed dramatically different health programs, the National Health Service in 1946 and the Medicare Act of 1965. He used American and British archival evidence to demonstrate that the preferences of citizens along with the organization of interest groups and the administrative capacity of government institutions were critical factors in accounting for the cross-national differences.
Jacobs’s 2000 book Politicians Don’t Pander looked at how changes in contemporary American politics and, especially, political parties altered the conditions that had facilitated some level of government responsiveness prior to the 1970s; the result is a more insular policy-making process that is less responsive to the preferences of most citizens. The book stated that the motivations of politicians during the 1980s and 1990s shifted from responding to majority opinion to crafting the words, arguments, and symbols to change public opinion to support the policies political elites and their allies and donors favored. Politicians Don’t Pander received awards from the American Political Science Association, the American Sociological Association, and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Jacobs extended his analysis of elite efforts at manipulation with James Druckman in the 2015 book Who Governs? Presidents, Public Opinion, and Manipulation. Citing polls and other evidence from presidential archives, they reported that presidents starting with Lyndon Johnson used their private research on public opinion to design arguments and personal images to build personal popularity and win elections in order to defy the policy preferences of most Americans.
Jacobs’s investigation of the sources of U.S. international economic and foreign policy confirmed the pattern of weak government unresponsiveness to the policy preferences of most Americans. In a 2005 study with Benjamin Page published in American Political Science Review, Jacobs' statistical analyses found that the views of business executives drove the policy of senior U.S. government officials.

Health care reform

Jacobs has published books on the passage of Medicare in 1965, the enactment of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, and the failure of Bill Clinton’s effort at health reform in 1993-94. His 2012 book on the Affordable Care Act, Health Care Reform and American Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know, co-written with Theda Skocpol, is in its third printing.
Jacobs has used his research on health policy to rethink the sources and effects of government policy. Typically, political observers focus on the impacts of public opinion, organized interest groups, and other forces on policy. Jacobs' work with political scientists Suzanne Mettler and Ling Zhu, in such journal articles as "What Health Reform Teaches Us About American Politics," considers instead how the passage of the Affordable Care Act is changing public opinion to support the law and spurring more Americans to alter their political behavior – including voting – to back health reform.

Political communications

Jacobs' book Talking Together: Public Deliberation in America and the Search for Community and related work comprised the first national empirical study of how Americans attempted to persuade each other about matters of politics or met in formally organized deliberative forums to discuss community concerns. The research in Talking Together indicated that more than one out of four Americans join organized deliberations – on par with more traditional forms of political engagement such as contacting a government official or attempting to persuade someone to vote for a favored candidate.

Central banks

Central banks and, specifically, the political dynamics of their policies is Jacobs' most recent area of research. His book Fed Power: How Finance Wins, written with Desmond King, is an investigation of the Federal Reserve Bank’s bias toward finance in its response to the 2008 financial crisis. Their 2018 work "The Fed’s Political Economy" investigates the variations across western countries in how central banks regulate risk, manage access to capital, and respond to the inequality generated by their policies.
Jacobs is a longstanding co-editor of the University of Chicago Press series in American politics.
Professor Jacobs’s research has received a number of awards as well as grants from, among others, the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the McKnight Foundation.

Career as public intellectual

Jacobs is a leading public intellectual, offering non-partisan commentary and programming on American politics and government policy. In 2005, Jacobs founded the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Under his direction, it has become a regional hub for research and initiatives to strengthen democratic institutions and civic engagement, with a mission to foster conversations and collaborations across the partisan divides in Minnesota and America. CSPG developed the first online non-partisan professional training program for election administrators. It also runs an iconic leadership development program called the Policy Fellows, which has supported Minnesota’s civic culture for three decades. Its alumni include U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar, former U.S. Senator Norm Coleman and many other prominent leaders in government, business, and non-profits. The Center also works closely with legislators in Minnesota by convening an annual one-day retreat of the entire legislature known as One Minnesota. It also collaborates on a similar initiative across the Midwest with the Council of State Governments. In addition, CSPG hosts dozens of public events on state and national politics and public policy each year.
Jacobs has been widely recognized for his non-partisan work with CSPG, the media, and civic organizations. The Minneapolis University Rotary Club awarded Jacobs its “Citizen of the Year Award” in 2017. The University of Minnesota recognized his community engagement with its “Outstanding Community Service Award” in 2014.
In 2003, he chaired the American Political Science Association's Task Force on Inequality and
American Democracy, the organization's first formal task force in half a century on the consequences of rising economic inequality for American democracy. The Task Force’s report in 2005 spurred increased media attention, research, and teaching on the political effects of rising economic and racial disparities.
For nearly 15 years, Jacobs taught with former Vice President Walter Mondale at the Humphrey School. Their course concentrated on the U.S. Constitution and national security and tracked the growing pattern across Democratic and Republican administrations of unilateral exercises of executive power since the Second World War.

Personal life

Jacobs is married to Julie A. Schumacher, a professor of English at the University of Minnesota. She is also a novelist, most notably for Dear Committee Members, for which she became the first woman to win the Thurber Prize for American Humor. She has also written seven other novels as well as numerous short stories, which have been anthologized in the O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories collections. They met in an English class during their first year at Oberlin College.
They have two adult daughters, Emma Lillian Jacobs and Isabella Nan Jacobs Hale.

Selected publications

Books