Spotlight
Biography
Matt Grossmann is Director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research (IPPSR) and Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University.
Most recently, Dr. Grossmann is publishing How Social Science Got Better: Overcoming Bias with More Evidence, Diversity, and Self-Reflection (Oxford University Press, 2021) on the topics of Trump's election, the Great Recession, what makes humans unique, models of infectious disease, social immobility, and racial bias in policing.
His book, Red State Blues: How the Conservative Revolution Stalled in the States, is from Cambridge University Press. He finds that while the Republican Party has gained substantial political control of state governments but has largely failed to enact policies that advance conservative goals.
Grossmann is also co-author of Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats, published by Oxford University Press in 2016 (with David A. Hopkins) and winner of the Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award from the American Political Science Association.
Grossmann’s a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center in Washington, DC, host of The Science of Politics Podcast and a regular contributor to FiveThirtyEight’s online political analysis. He has also published op-eds in The New York Times and The Washington Post.
While on sabbatical from 2018-2019, he served as Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and as Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University.
Grossmann has authored numerous journal articles on such topics as policy change, political party networks, the legislative process and public opinion. His research appears in the Journal of Politics, Policy Studies Journal, Perspectives on Politics, American Politics Research and fifteen other outlets.
He was named IPPSR Director in January 2016. IPPSR is a policy, leadership and research unit within MSU’s College of Social Science, conducting more than $1.5 million in grant- or contract-funded research and raising more than $300,000 in donations annually.
He received a bachelor’s degree from Claremont McKenna College, a master’s degree in political science in 2002 and doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2007.