Margaret Weir


Margaret M. Weir is an American political scientist and sociologist, best known for her work on social policy and the politics of poverty in the United States, particularly at the levels of state and local government.

Career

Weir is currently a professor at Brown University. She was a professor of political science and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where her research and teaching fields included American political development, urban politics and policy, political sociology, and comparative studies of the welfare state. She is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where she had served previously as a senior fellow in governmental studies, from 1992 to 1997. From 1985 to 1992, she was a faculty member at Harvard University in the Department of Government.
Weir is currently involved in a number of organizations. She is director of the Building Resilient Regions Network, which is funded by the MacArthur Foundation. At the Scholars Strategy Network, she is co-director of the Bay Area regional network and a regular contributor of briefs. She also serves on the advisory board at the Center for Labor Research and Education.
Weir has written widely on social policy and politics in the United States. In Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States, she addresses the power of ideas in policymaking and the politics of interest formation in order to explain the persistence of lacking employment policy in the United States. With Ira Katznelson, Weir coauthored Schooling for All: Class, Race, and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal, which focuses on public school systems in Chicago and San Francisco in order to examine equal access to education as a dwindling civil right. Weir has also edited several volumes, including The Politics of Social Policy in the United States with Ann Shola Orloff and Theda Skocpol.
Weir's chapter "Creating Justice for the Poor in the New Metropolis," from Justice and the American Metropolis was the topic of discussion on the radio show Against the Grain on January 10, 2012.
In 2004, Weir received an Investigator Award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for work on American health policy reform.

Selected bibliography