Paul Pierson
American political scientist
Paul Pierson (born 1959) is an American professor of political science specializing in comparative politics and holder of the John Gross Endowed Chair of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. From 2007-2010 he served at UC Berkeley as Chair of the Department of Political Science. He is noted for his research on comparative public policy and political economy, the welfare state, and American political development. His works on the welfare state and historical institutionalism have been characterized as influential.
Biography
Pierson is a native of Eugene, Oregon, where both of his parents taught at the University of Oregon. He graduated with a B.A. in government from Oberlin College in 1981 and then attended graduate school at Yale University, completing an M.A. and MPhil in 1986 and a PhD degree in political science in 1989.
Pierson taught at Harvard University from 1989 to 2004, when he moved to the University of California, Berkeley. He was a visiting professor at the European University Institute in 1999.
Pierson's first book, Dismantling the Welfare State?, was a revision of his doctoral dissertation and won the American Political Science Association's Kammerer Prize for the best work on American national politics published in 1994. Jacob Hacker described the book as "pathbreaking" and as the start of a substantial scholarly literature on welfare state retrenchment.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q743605. VIAF identifies the subject as 69072293. The Library of Congress control number is n93109358. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1959, 2007, 2010 and 1981.
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This entry incorporates text from “Paul Pierson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.