Biosketch
Donald Kinder is best known for his studies of the political implications of social identity in the contemporary US. Kinder was born and raised in Des Plaines, Illinois. He graduated from Stanford University in 1969 with a degree in psychology and from UCLA in 1975 with a PhD, also in psychology. Between 1975 and 1981, Kinder taught at Yale. In 1981, he moved to Michigan, where he is now the Philip E. Converse Distinguished University Professor of Political Science. A Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Kinder is the author of News that Matters (1987), Divided by Color (1996), Us against Them (2009), The End of Race? (2012), and Neither Liberal Nor Conservative (2017), among other works.
Research Interests
Kinder has just completed a book on the misunderstanding of ideology in the study of mass politics in the United States and in the developed world more generally. He is currently at work on two principal projects. One, with Nancy Burns, provides a systematic comparison between gender and race as alternative forms of political organization. A second takes on transformation in racial politics in the United States since World War II. In 1944, Gunnar Myrdal published a masterwork of social science, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. A great deal has changed since then, much of it for the good. With Myrdal's analysis very much in mind, my purpose is to clarify and understand the place of race in contemporary American politics.
Membership Type
Member
Election Year
2017
Primary Section
Section 53: Social and Political Sciences
Secondary Section
Section 52: Psychological and Cognitive Sciences