s Virginia Sapiro Research

Research:
Select bibliography appears below.

Virginia Sapiro's research interests have spanned widely over her career, including the areas of political psychology, political behavior, U.S. politics, political history, feminist and democratic theory, the design and philosophy of social science research, the state of women's studies and its contributions to social science, and issues relating to higher education.

Sapiro (B.A. Clark University 1972; Ph.D. University of Michigan 1976) received the International Society for Political Psychology's Erik Eriksen Award for Early Career Contributions in Political Psychology, the American Political Science Association's Victoria Schuck Award for best book on women and politics for A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as other awards for scholarly papers from the Midwest, Southern, and Western Political Science Associations. In 1985 she was awarded the Sophonisba P. Breckinridge Professorship of Political Science and Women's Studies by the University of Wisconsin - Madison, in 2000 the University conferred on her the Hilldale Award in the social sciences for achievement in teaching, research, and service. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. From 1997-2000 she also served as a Research Scholar at the Center for Political Studies, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. She is a site visitor for the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs, Inc., (AAHRPP).

From 1992 to 1997 she served on the national Board of Overseers of the American National Election Studies, the benchmark scholarly study of the U.S. electorate which has been running since 1948. She served as Principal Investigator of NES from 1997 through 2000. Through her work on NES she became involved as one of the participating investigators, and eventually as a member of the Planning Committee of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, a collaborative program of cross-national research among election studies conducted in over fifty consolidated and emerging democracies. She was Principal Investigator on the 1999-2000 National Science Foundation grant supporting the Secretariat of CSES.

Sapiro was the founding President of the American Political Science Association Organized Section on Women and Politics Research and she chaired the APSA Organized Section on Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior. She has served on the editorial boards of journals as diverse as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Political Psychology, Social Science History and Women and Politics.

SELECT SELECTED THEMATIC BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PUBLICATIONS AND PAPERS (for a full listing, see curriculum vita):

I. Political Behavior/Political Psychology, including Gender Politics

A. A History of Political Action in the United States. This is her major recent research project, focusing on the history of political action in the United States. It is not a chronological investigation but rather, it is framed thematically and explores these two questions: How, in the course of the development of one polity, do certain acts come to be understood as political acts? What circumstances lead particular groups and individuals to choose one specific kind of political act rather than another when they do engage in political action?

  • Toward a History of Political Action in the United States. An earlier version was delivered at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, New Orleans, 1996. This paper is an introduction to the project as a whole.
  • Seeking Knowledge and Information as Political Action: A U.S. Historical Case Study, Prepared for delivery at the Annual Meeting of the European Consortium for Political Research, Turin, March, 2002.
  • "Considering Political Civility Historically: A Case Study of the United States. Paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the International Society for Political Psychology, Amsterdam, 1999.
  • "Economic Activity as Political Action." Prepared for delivery at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, September, 2000, Washington, D.C.
  • Electoral Participation as Political Action. Prepared for the conference on Political Participation: Building a Research Agenda, Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, Princeton University, October 2000.

B. U.S. Political Behavior and Public Opinion

  • Virginia Sapiro and Katherine Cramer Walsh, "Doing Gender in Congressional Campaign Advertisements." Paper prepared for the Annual Meeting of the International Society for Political Psychology, Berlin, 2002.
  • “Electoral Politics: The 2000 Election and Beyond.” In Gillian Peele, Christopher J. Bailey, Bruce Cain, and B. Guy Peters, ed., Developments in American Politics 4. New York: Palgrave, 2002, pp.15-34.
  • Virginia Sapiro and Pamela Johnston Conover. 2001. “Gender Equality in the Public Mind.” Women and Politics 22 (1): 1-36.
  • Virginia Sapiro and David Canon. 1999. Race, Gender, and the Clinton Presidency. In Colin Campbell and Bert Rockman, eds., The Clinton Legacy. Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House Publishers, pp.207-41.
  • Virginia Sapiro and Joe Soss. 1999. “Spectacular Politics, Dramatic Interpretations: Multiple Meanings in the Thomas/Hill Hearings.” Political Communication, 16 (3): 285-314.
  • Virginia Sapiro with Pamela Johnston Conover. 1997. "The Variable Gender Basis of Electoral Politics: Gender and Context in the 1992 U.S. Election." British Journal of Political Science 27: 497-523.
  • Pamela Johnston Conover and Virginia Sapiro, "Gender, Feminist Consciousness, and War" American Journal of Political Science 37 (1993):1079-1099.
  • "Feminism: A Generation Later." The Annals 515 (1991):10-22.
  • "Private Costs of Public Commitments or Public Costs of Private Commitments? Family Roles versus Political Ambition." American Journal of Political Science 26 (1982), 265-79.
  • "If U.S. Senator Baker Were a Woman: An Experimental Study of Candidate Images." Political Psychology 3 (1981-82), 61-83.
  • From the Front: Inter-Sex and Intergenerational Conflict Over the Status of Women." Western Political Quarterly 33 (1980), 260-77.

C. Political Socialization and Individual Political Development

  • “Not Your Parents’ Political Socialization: Introduction for a New Generation.” In Annual Review of Political Science, Vol 7, 2004, pp.1-23.
  • "Political Socialization During Adulthood: Clarifying the Political Time of Our Lives," in M.X. Delli Carpini, L. Huddy, and R.Y. Shapiro, eds., Research in Micropolitics: New Directions in Political Psychology. JAI Press, 1994, pp.197-223.
  • "The Women's Movement and the Creation of Gender Consciousness: Social Movements as Social Agents." In O. Ichilov, ed., Political Socialization for Democracy. Teachers' College Press, 1990, pp.266-80.
  • "What the Political Socialization of Women Can Tell Us About the Political Socialization of People." In C. Farnham, ed., The Impact of Feminist Research in the Academy.Indiana University Press, 1987, pp.148-73.
  • The Political Integration of Women: Roles, Socialization, and Politics. University of Illinois Press, 1983.

D. Gendered Issues in the Study of Political Behavior, Political Psychology and Political Sociology

  • "Gender, Social Capital, and Politics." In Brenda O’Neill and Elisabeth Gidengil, eds., Gender and Social Capital, Routledge, 2005.
  • "Theorizing Gender in Political Psychology Research," In David O. Sears, Leonie Huddy, and Robert L. Jervis, ed., Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp.601-34.
  • Through a Glass Ceiling Darkly: Developments in the Political Psychology of Gender Stratification. Originally prepared for delivery at the 2nd Annual Dilemmas of Democracy Conference, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, 17 February 2003.
  • “It’s the Context, Situation, and Question, Stupid: The Gender Basis of Public Opinion.” In Barbara Norrander and Clyde Wilcox, ed., Understanding Public Opinion (Second edition). Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2001, pp.21-42.
  • Michele Claibourn and Virginia Sapiro. "Gender Differences in Citizen-Level Democratic Citizenship: Evidence from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems." International Political Science Association, Quebec, 2000.
  • "Democracy minus Women Is Not Democracy: Gender and World Changes in Citizenship." In Orit Ichilov, ed., Citizenship and Citizenship Education in a Changing World, London (U.K.) and Portland, Oregon: Woburn Press, 1998, pp.174-90.
  • "Sex and Games: On Oppression and Rationality." British Journal of Political Science 9 (1979), 318-24.

E. Other Issues in the Study of Public Opinion and Political Behavior

II. The State, Public Policy, and Law

  • Women, Biology, and Public Policy (edited). Sage, 1985.
  • "The Gender Basis of American Social Policy." Political Science Quarterly 101 (1986):221-38. Reprinted in L. Gordon, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), pp.36-54; in N. Cott, ed., History of Women in America: Historical Articles on Women's Lives and Activities, Vol 17: Social and Moral Reform (K.G. Saur, 1994), pp.713-30; in T. D. Campbell, ed., International Library of Essays in Law and Legal Theory.
  • "Gender Equity in Wisconsin Legal Careers: Opening the Door to Women Attorneys." Wisconsin Lawyer 67 (1994):6-12.
  • Graham K. Wilson and Virginia Sapiro. "Women and Occupational Safety and Health Policy." In V. Sapiro, ed., Women, Biology, and Public Policy. Sage, 1985, pp.137-56.
  • "Women, Citizenship, and Nationality: Immigration and Naturalization Policies in the United States." Politics and Society 13 (1984):1-26.
  • "When Are Interests Interesting? The Problem of Political Representation of Women." American Political Science Review 75 (1981), 701-16. Reprinted in A. Phillips, ed., Feminism and Politics (Oxford University Press, 1998), pp.161-92.

III. Political Theory/Feminist Theory

  • A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft. University of Chicago Press, 1992. (Received APSA Victoria Schuck Award for best book published on Women and Politics published in 1992).
  • "A Woman's Struggle for a Language of Enlightenment and Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment 'Feminism.'" In T. Akkerman and S. Stuurman, eds., Perspectives on Feminist Political Thought in European History: From the Middle Ages to the Present. Routledge, 1998, pp.122-35.
  • "Wollstonecraft, Feminism, and Democracy: 'Being Bastilled.'" In M. Falco, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996, pp.33-46.
  • Virginia Sapiro and Penny Weiss. "Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft: Restoring the Conversation." In M. Falco, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996, pp.179-208.
  • "'Private' Coercion and Democratic Theory," in G. E. Marcus and R. Hansen, eds., Reconsidering the Democratic Public. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.
  • "The Political Uses of Symbolic Women: An Essay in Honor of Murray Edelman." Political Communication 10 (1993): 137-49.
  • "Engendering Cultural Differences." In M. C. Young, ed., The Rising Tide of Cultural Pluralism: The Nation State at Bay? University of Wisconsin Press, 1993, pp.36-54.

IV. Gender Studies/Women's Studies

For relevant works in political behavior/political psychology, the state and policy, or political theory, see above categories.

  • Women in American Society: An Introduction to Women's Studies. Fourth Edition. Mayfield Publishing Co., 2002. (Previous editions: 1986, 1990, 1994, 1998.)
  • "Feminist Studies and Political Science -- and Vice Versa," in D.C. Stanton and A.J. Stewart, eds., Feminisms in the Academy. University of Michigan Press, 1995, pp.291-310. Reprinted in A. Phillips, ed., Feminism and Politics (Oxford University Press, 1998), pp.67-89.
  • "Gender Politics, Gendered Politics: The State of the Field." In W. Crotty, ed., Political Science: Looking to the Future. Northwestern University Press, 1991, pp.165-88.
  • "Women's Studies and Political Conflict." In J. Sherman and E. Beck, eds., The Prism of Sex: Essays in the Sociology of Knowledge. University of Wisconsin Press, 1979, 318-24.

V. Teaching and Learning

VI. Satire