SARAH E. JAMES
PhD, MEd
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Gonzaga University
ABOUT

I am an assistant professor in the Political Science Department at Gonzaga University. I earned my PhD in Government and Social Policy from Harvard University in May 2021. Broadly, I study the role of organizations and institutions in perpetuating and addressing persistent inequality in the American political economy. My research emphasizes lenses of federalism, state & bureaucratic politics, and American political development and has been published in State Politics and Policy Quarterly and the Russell Sage Journal for the Social Sciences. My book The Politics of Failed Politics (Oxford University Press) examines in the role of institutions and state capacity in the recognition of policy failure. I have been a graduate fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality & Social Policy.