Biographical Sketch

Steven S. Smith is the Kate M. Gregg Distinguished Professor of Social Sciences, Professor of Political Science, and the Director of the Murray Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University.  He is the Director of the American Panel Survey (TAPS), a project of the Weidenbaum Center, which provides one of the best survey research platforms in the social sciences, http://taps.wustl.edu.

He has taught at George Washington University, Northwestern University, and the University of Minnesota, where he was the Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Political Science and Law.  He has authored or coauthored several books on congressional politics and a book on the formation of the Russian State Duma, coauthors The American Congress, a Cambridge University Press textbook, and coedits a volume on American politics. He has worked on Capitol Hill in several capacities, served as a Congressional Fellow of the American Political Science Association, and was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.  He served as the chair of the Legislative Studies Section of the American Political Science Association, served on the Executive Committee of the Research Committee of Legislative Scholars of the International Political Science Association, and served as a member of the board of directors of the Dirksen Congress Center.  He served as an editor of Legislative Studies Quarterly and on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and Congress & the Presidency.

Selected Publications

The Senate Syndrome: the Evolution of Parliamentary Warfare in the Modern U.S. Senate (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014)

Party Influence in Congress (Cambridge 2007), The American Congress, 6th ed. (Cambridge 2009)

Reforming the Presidential Nomination Process (Brookings, 2009)

Politics or Principle:  Filibustering in the U.S. Senate (Brookings 1997)

The Politics of Institutional Choice: The Formation of the Russian State Duma  (Princeton 2000)

Amazon publications page

Conference Papers

Ideological Labels in America: Self-Identification of Ideological Positions on Issues and the Operational-Symbolic Ideology Problem (presented at the Southern Political Science Association Meeting, January 2013).

Online

Twitter: ProfStevenSmith

Facebook: The American Congress