Katherine (Kathy) J. Cramer is the Virginia Sapiro Professor of Political Science and the Natalie C. Horton Chair of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Her work focuses on the ways that people make sense of politics and their place in it. By listening to people talk with one another, Kathy’s research has revealed the central roles of race, place, and class in political beliefs and behaviors. Her scholarship has been recognized not only for its contributions to our understanding of American political behavior, but for her rigorous methodological innovations, employing ethnographic and community-based fieldwork to observe politics through conversations.
Kathy received her bachelor’s degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1994) and her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan (2000). She is the co-chair of an American Academy of Arts & Science commission called Reimagining Our Economy. She is a close collaborator with the Center for Constructive Communication at the MIT Media Lab and its partner nonprofit, Cortico, and is one of the founders of Fora, a human-tech platform that enables people to understand their community members’ life experiences, amplify typically underheard voices, inform public understanding, and drive policy and decision making to better outcomes. Her book, The Politics of Resentment (2016), is widely considered one of the authoritative works on understanding the rural-urban divide in the United States and its role in contemporary politics. She is a faculty affiliate of an array of interdisciplinary programs and departments at UW-Madison. She has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.
Selected Works
Professor Cramer is a co-chair of this commission, a crosspartisan, interdisciplinary effort that seeks to reimagine the nation’s political economy, to rethink the values that drive economic policy making, and to enable opportunity for all Americans. Guided by an understanding of the connections between our political and economic systems, and with close attention to the daily experiences of Americans, this commission is advancing bold, achievable recommendations to help create an economy that helps individuals, communities, and the nation flourish. See the commission’s report, released on November 9, 2023, here. The commission’s new CORE Score dashboard of American wellbeing is available here. Also, the commission’s photojournal of voices and images, Faces of America: Getting By in Our Economy, is available here.
Fora (Formerly the Local Voices Network)
Professor Cramer is one of the founders of this public conversation project, which is operated by Cortico, the nonprofit partner of The Center for Constructive Communication at the MIT Media Lab.
The Political Impact of Social and Economic Change on the Lives of White Americans is a book manuscript in process co-authored with Larry Bartels that investigates the political impact of social and economic changes in the United States since the 1960s. Bartels and Cramer focus on the way white Americans’ attitudes and behaviors have responded to these changes, to better understand how the United States has arrived at this challenging democratic moment. The project makes use of a panel study begun by political scientist Kent Jennings in 1965 of a national cross-section of people who were high school seniors at the time. The full bibliography of scholarship generated from Kent Jennings’ panel study can be found here. Bartels and Cramer are using the 4 waves of survey data collected through 1997 and in-depth interviews they have conducted of several dozen of these respondents. Recent conference papers on this project are at https://my.vanderbilt.edu/larrybartels/working-papers/
In this award winning work, The Politics of Resentment (2016) Professor Cramer broke ground in our understanding of the rural-urban divide in American life, and its consequences for contemporary American politics.