Biography
Before joining ISPS, Eleanor Schiff spent three years at Yale lecturing in the Political Science Department on U.S. federal education policy and U.S. state and local politics. Before that, she held academic appointments at Dickenson College, Bucknell University, and Penn State University teaching various courses in American politics. She earned both her Ph.D. and M.B.A. at Penn State.
Schiff has served as deputy director for the U.S. Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education and four years in the West Wing of the White House as special assistant to the assistant to the president for domestic policy holding top secret clearance.
She specializes in the study of American political institutions with a particular focus on inter-branch interactions with the federal bureaucracy, policymaking dynamics, and extra-institutional actors’ influence on the bureaucracy. Her 2020 book, Bureaucracy’s Masters and Minions: The Politics of Controlling the U.S. Bureaucracy, explores how the president and the Congress jointly control the bureaucracy and how agency-specific characteristics can temper the degree of political control. Additionally, her research has been published in Interest Groups & Advocacy.