Sarah Binder

Political Science Professor, George Washington University

Sarah Binder is a professor of political science at George Washington University and a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, specializing in Congress and legislative politics. She is most recently the co-author with Mark Spindel of The Myth of Independence: How Congress Governs the Federal Reserve (Princeton University Press 2017), which was awarded the Richard F. Fenno Jr. Prize for the best book published in legislative politics in 2017 and the Gladys Kammerer Award for the best book published in 2017 on U.S. national policy. Her earlier books include Minority Rights, Majority Rule: Partisanship and the Development of Congress (Cambridge University Press 1997); with Steven S.Smith, Politics or Principle? Filibustering in the United States Senate (Brookings Institution Press 1997); Stalemate: Causes and Consequences of Legislative Gridlock (Brookings Institution Press, 2003) (awarded the Richard F. Fenno Jr. Prize) and with Forrest Maltzman, Advice and Dissent: The Struggle to Shape the Federal Judiciary (Brookings Institution Press 2009). Her work has also appeared in the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, the American Journal of Political Science, and elsewhere. Binder was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015. She is also a political science editor at The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, a former co-editor of Legislative Studies Quarterly, and serves as president of the Midwest Political Science Association (2019-20). Binder received her B.A. from Yale University in 1986 and her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Minnesota in 1995. She joined Brookings in 1995 and George Washington University in 1999. Image: gwu.edu