M. Kent Jennings

Professor Jennings specializes in the areas of political socialization and public opinion, gender and politics, political participation, and research design and data collection.

He was a member of the Political Science Department and the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan from 1963-81 and was earlier affiliated with the Brookings Institution. From 1984 to 1996, he held a joint faculty appointments at both U.C. Santa Barbara and the University of Michigan. Jennings has been a Visiting Scholar or Professor at the University of Oregon, Tilburg University (the Netherlands), University of California, Los Angeles, and Arizona State University, where he was the first Barry Goldwater Professor of American Institutions. In addition to having been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, he has received research grants from the Ford Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Mental Health.

Professor Jennings was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982. He served as President of the International Society of Political Psychology in 1989-90 and as President of the American Political Science Association in 1997-98. He has published over sixty-five articles in leading scholarly journals and is the author or co-author of the following books: Community Influentials, The Image of the Federal Service, The Political Character of Adolescence, Governing American Schools, Generations and Politics, Parties in Transition, and Continuities in Political Action. His current research interests concern the longitudinal analyses of political orientations, gender and politics, and mass public participation in varying contexts.

C.V. (in .pdf format)