Dr. Elizabeth Wiener, Ph.D.

Elizabeth Wiener is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at Occidental College. She is a graduate of Kenyon College (2009) and received her Ph.D. from Emory University in 2020. Dr. Wiener teaches courses in the fields of American government, public policy, and research methods in the social sciences. Focusing her research on policymaking, organized advocacy, and marginalized group representation, Dr. Wiener's current work considers the relationships between state-level lobbying, descriptive representation, and substantive representation in public policy for groups historically excluded from politics.  Her research has been published in Political Research Quarterly and The Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy.

 

Prior to her graduate studies at Emory, Dr. Wiener worked on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. as a Legislative Associate and Lobbyist for the Communications Workers of America. Her advocacy experiences and work in the professional policy world continue to inspire her teaching and research today.

 

Dr. Wiener is currently working on a book project comparing the policymaking connections between women's issue lobbyists, identity, and state legislators across the U.S. states. She explores how women's interest lobbyists interact with female and male legislators differently and strategically to increase women's substantive representation across a wide spectrum of policy issues. Dr. Wiener employs mixed methodologies in this project, employing case study comparisons, original qualitative research, and large-n data that leverage variation at the individual level, at the state level, and across time. She examines how the effects of lobbying differ according to dimensions of legislator identity while also evaluating how institutional differences across states explain if and why these differences emerge.