Stephen Daniel Ansolabehere is a professor of government at

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

. He is the younger brother of animator Joe Ansolabehere.

Education

Ansolabehere received his B.A. in

political science Political science is the scientific study of politics. It is a social science dealing with systems of governance and Power (social and political), power, and the analysis of political activities, political philosophy, political thought, polit ...

and B.S. in economics from the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota Twin Cities (historically known as University of Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint ...

in 1984, and his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard in 1989.

Career

From 1989 to 1993, Ansolabehere served as an assistant professor in the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school the ...

' department of political science. He became an associate professor of political science at

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

in 1995, and Elting R. Morison Professor of Political Science there in 1998. He held this position from 1998 until joining the faculty of Harvard in 2008.

Work

Ansolabehere is known for his research on multiple aspects of elections in the United States, including public opinion, mass media, and representation. In 2003, he published a paper arguing that in the United States, people and corporations tend to consider donating money to be an inefficient way of influencing politicians. The same paper argued that most people who donate to a politician do so because they genuinely support the politician's cause, and because donating to support their preferred politician makes them feel good, and that campaign spending as a percentage of GDP may have actually declined in the previous 100 years.

Honors and awards

In 1996, Ansolabehere received the Goldsmith Book Prize for the book ''Going Negative'', which he co-authored with

Shanto Iyengar Shanto Iyengar is an American political scientist and professor of political science at Stanford University. He is also the Harry & Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford, the director of Stanford's Political Communication Lab, a ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ansolabehere, Stephen Daniel Harvard University faculty University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts alumni American political scientists Living people Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences faculty University of California, Los Angeles faculty Year of birth missing (living people) American people of Basque descent