Jacob Hacker

Jacob Hacker
ISPS 
Faculty Fellows

Jacob Hacker

Title 
Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science
Yale University

Jacob S. Hacker is Stanley Resor Professor of Political Science, co-director of the Ludwig Program in Public Sector Leadership at Yale Law School, and director of the American Political Economy eXchange (APEX) at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. He served as director of ISPS from 2011 through 2020. An expert on American politics and policy, he is the author or co-author of more than a half-dozen books, numerous journal articles, and a wide range of popular writings. His 2002 book The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (2002) was awarded the Aaron Wildavsky Enduring Contribution Award of the American Political Science Association, given to a book that has made a lasting contribution to the study of public policy. His latest book, written with Paul Pierson, is Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality (2020). A regular policy advisor and expert commentator, Professor Hacker is known for his writings on health policy, especially his development of the so-called public option. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he received the Robert Ball Award of the National Academy of Social Insurance in 2020 and was inducted into the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2021. He is a founding director of the Consortium on American Political Economy (CAPE), established in 2020 with the support of the Hewlett Foundation. In 2022, he was a visiting scholar in Paris at the Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (MaxPo) and the Kluge Chair in American Law and Governance at the U.S. Library of Congress. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he served on the Academy’s Commission on Reimaging Our Economy (CORE) from 2021 to 2023 and helped develop its new measure of well-being, the CORE Score, which is now maintained and updated by APEX. Through fall 2025, he is a Berlin Prize Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin.

Jacob Hacker’s website.

Curriculum Vitae

Discipline 
Political Science