Margaret Weir

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Margaret Weir is a professor of political science and sociology at the University of California at Berkeley and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution. She studies the politics of social policy in the United States and Europe and has published on the role of institutions, racial and ethnic divisions, and ideas in shaping social and economic policies over the past century.

Weir’s current project addresses the contemporary politics of spatial inequalities in the American metropolis. Today, half the metropolitan poor live in suburban areas, yet the public and nonprofit infrastructure of services and transportation was developed in response to urban poverty. Drawing on evidence from Atlanta, Chicago, and Denver, Weir analyzes strategies for adjusting existing policies and building political alliances to fit the new, more variegated social geography of need. The study shows how poverty’s shifting location is creating new forms of isolation for the poor, while enhancing opportunity and connection for others.

Weir earned her PhD at the University of Chicago. Her fellowships include awards from the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She has served as program chair of the American Political Science Association and president of its section on politics and history. Weir currently serves as director of the MacArthur Research Network on Building Resilient Regions. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.