Lawrence R. Jacobs

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.

Lawrence R. Jacobs (born March 6, 1959) is an American political scientist and founder and director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance (CSPG) at the University of Minnesota.

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.

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 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.

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

Jacobs's 2000 book Politicians Don’t Pander (co-authored with Robert Y. Shapiro) 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.

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, 17 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.

His latest book is Democracy Under Fire: Donald Trump and the Breaking of American History.

In a 2005 study with Benjamin Page published in American Political Science Review, Jacobs' statistical analyses found that the views of business executives (rather than public opinion and policy experts) drove the policy of senior U.S. government officials.

In 2005, Jacobs founded the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance (CSPG) 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.

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.

Fed Power was updated in its second edition to cover the impact on the Biden administration by Black Lives Matter protests and the growing influence of progressives in the Democratic Party.

More recently, Jacobs and King are investigating 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’ 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.

Jacobs is a leading public intellectual, offering non-partisan commentary and programming on American politics and government policy.

Jacobs extended his analysis of elite efforts at manipulation with James N. 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.

His 2015 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.

Jacobs' book Talking Together: Public Deliberation in America and the Search for Community (co-authored with Fay Lomax Cook, and Michael X. Delli Carpini) 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 and, specifically, the political dynamics of their policies is one of Jacobs' recent areas of research.

In 2020, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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.