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. She is known for her refreshing approach to the study of public opinion in which I listens to people. She is an expert in listening to residents of democracies to illuminate the way they understand public issues, their connections to government, and to each other.
Her innovative approach has led the way in understanding some of the most central issues affecting democracy in the United States and around the world. Her book, The Politics of Resentment (2016, University of Chicago Press), was one of the first to draw our attention to the rural'/urban divide in contemporary politics and is widely considered one of the authoritative works on this topic.
Her recently released book with Larry Bartels, The Politics of Social Change: From the Sixties to the Present through the Eyes of a Generation (2026, University of Chicago Press), illuminates the deep roots of contemporary divides in the United States.
Kathy received her bachelor’s degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1994) and her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan (2000). She recently served as the Commission on Reimagining Our Economy of the American Academy of Arts & Science. Kathy 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 the system that Cortico has created and implemented with hundreds of community partners worldwide to listen to community members’ experiences, amplify underheard voices, inform public understanding, and drive policy and decision making to better outcomes.
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
The Politics of Social Change:
From the Sixties to the Present through the Eyes of a Generation
The Politics of Social Change is a new book co-authored with political scientist Larry Bartels that investigates the political impact of social and economic changes in the United States since the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, March 2026). 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. A bibliography of scholarship generated from Kent Jennings’ panel study can be found here. Bartels and Cramer used the 4 waves of survey data collected through 1997 and in-depth interviews they have conducted of several dozen of these respondents.
Professor Cramer served as 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 advanced 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.
The Cortico Platform
Professor Cramer is one of the founders of this public conversation system, which is operated by Cortico, the nonprofit partner of The Center for Constructive Communication at the MIT Media Lab.
In the award winning work, The Politics of Resentment (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Professor Cramer broke ground in our understanding of the rural-urban divide in American life, and its consequences for contemporary American politics.