Lawrence R. Jacobs (born March 6, 1959) is an American political scientist and founder and director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance (CSPG) at the University of Minnesota. He was appointed the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs in 2005 and holds the McKnight Presidential Chair. Jacobs has written or edited, alone or collaboratively, 17 books and over 100 scholarly articles in addition to numerous reports and media essays on American democracy, national and Minnesota elections, political communications, health care reform, and economic inequality. His latest book is Democracy Under Fire: Donald Trump and the Breaking of American History. In 2020, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Early life
Jacobs was born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. His father, Henry Jacobs, served in the U.S. Army and worked in New York City as a stenographer, opening his own firm. His mother, Judy Jacobs, was a registered nurse.
Jacobs graduated from Oberlin College in 1981 with a B.A. in History and English and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in political science in 1990.
Career as researcher
Recurring topics in Jacobs' research include American democracy, health care reform, political communications, and central banking.
American democracy
Jacobs' first book, The Health of Nations, and related studies identified the political and institutional conditions that explain why two broadly similar countries – the U.S. and Britain – designed dramatically different health programs, the National Health Service in 1946 and the Medicare Act of 1965. He used American and British archival evidence to demonstrate that the preferences of citizens along with the organization of interest groups and the administrative capacity of government institutions were critical factors in accounting for the cross-national differences.
Jacobs's 2000 book Politicians Don’t Pander (co-authored with Robert Y. Shapiro) looked at how changes in contemporary American politics and, especially, political parties altered the conditions that had facilitated some level of government responsiveness prior to the 1970s; the result is a more insular policy-making process that is less responsive to the preferences of most citizens. The book stated that the motivations of politicians during the 1980s and 1990s shifted from responding to majority opinion to crafting the words, arguments, and symbols to change public opinion to support the policies political elites and their allies and donors favored. Politicians Don’t Pander received awards from the American Political Science Association, the American Sociological Association, and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Jacobs extended his analysis of elite efforts at manipulation with James N. Druckman in the 2015 book Who Governs? Presidents, Public Opinion, and Manipulation. Citing polls and other evidence from presidential archives, they reported that presidents starting with Lyndon Johnson used their private research on public opinion to design arguments and personal images to build personal popularity and win elections in order to defy the policy preferences of most Americans.
Jacobs's investigation of the sources of U.S. international economic and foreign policy confirmed the pattern of weak government unresponsiveness to the policy preferences of most Americans. In a 2005 study with Benjamin Page published in American Political Science Review, Jacobs' statistical analyses found that the views of business executives (rather than public opinion and policy experts) drove the policy of senior U.S. government officials.
Health care reform
Jacobs has published books on the passage of Medicare in 1965, the enactment of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, and the failure of Bill Clinton’s effort at health reform in 1993-94. His 2015 book on the Affordable Care Act, Health Care Reform and American Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know, co-written with Theda Skocpol, is in its third printing.