Robert Y. Shapiro, Ph.D.

Robert Y. Shapiro (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1982) is the Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government in the Department of Political Science and Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He is currently the President of the Academy of Political Science.  He is a past chair of the Department of Political Science at Columbia University and served as acting director of Columbia’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) during 2008-2009.  He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, received a Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award in 2012, and in 2010 the Outstanding Achievement Award of the New York Chapter of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (NYAAPOR).  He specializes in American politics with research and teaching interests in public opinion, policymaking, political leadership, the mass media, and applications of statistical methods. He has taught at Columbia since 1982 after receiving his degree and serving as a study director at the National Opinion Research Center (University of Chicago).  He is co-author of The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences (with Benjamin Page, University of Chicago Press, 1992) and Politicians Don't Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness (with Lawrence Jacobs, University of Chicago Press, 2000).  His most recent books are The Oxford Handbook of American Public Opinion and the Media (edited with Lawrence R. Jacobs, Oxford University Press, 2011), and Selling Fear: Counterterrorism, the Media, and Public Opinion (with Brigittte L. Nacos  and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon, University of Chicago Press, 2011), and Presidential Selection and Democracy (edited with Demetrios James Caraley, Academy of Political Science, 2019).