Faculty Affiliates
Joseph M. Bessette
Alice Tweed Tuohy Professor Government and Ethics | Government Department, CMC, Emeritus
Joseph M. Bessette (B.S. Boston College; M.A. and Ph.D. University of Chicago) is the Alice Tweed Tuohy Professor of Government and Ethics Emeritus at Claremont McKenna College. His areas of expertise include ethics and American democracy, the presidency, American politics, crime and criminal justice, and American constitutionalism. His publications include By Man Shall His Blood be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment, with Edward Feser (Ignatius Press, 2017), The Imperial Presidency and the Constitution, edited with Andrew Busch and Gary Schmitt (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), American Government and Politics: Deliberation, Democracy, and Citizenship (Cengage/Wadsworth 2013), second edition; The Constitutional Presidency (Johns Hopkins University Press 2009); and The Mild Voice of Reason: Deliberative Democracy and American National Government (University of Chicago 1994). He previously served in the Cook County (IL) State’s Attorney’s Office and was Deputy Director and Acting Director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the U.S. Department of Justice.
Michael Javen Fortner (B.A. Emory University; M.A. and Ph.D. Harvard University) is the Pamela B. Gann Associate Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College, where he also serves as Director of the Dreier Roundtable. Fortner is also a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C. and an affiliated faculty of the Henry Salvatory Center at CMC. His work studies the intersection of American political development and political philosophy—particularly in the areas of race, ethnicity, and class. He is the author of Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment (Harvard 2015), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and winner of the New York Academy of History’s Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in New York History. Along with Amy Bridges, he edited a volume on city politics, Urban Citizenship and American Democracy (SUNY 2016). He has also been published in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Newsweek, and Dissent magazine, and his research has been covered in major media outlets, such as the Atlantic, The New York Times, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, the Daily Beast, Time, and NPR.
Emily Pears
Associate Professor | Government Department, CMC
Emily Pears (B.A. Claremont McKenna College; M.A.; Ph.D. University of Virginia) is an Associate Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College. Her research focus is in the areas of 19th-century U.S. federalism, American political development, American nationalism, and U.S. state-building. She previously worked as a policy advocate for voting rights and redistricting reform issues in San Francisco and Sacramento. Her published works include Cords of Affection: Constructing Constitutional Union in Early American History (Kansas 2021) which won “Best Book in American Political Thought, 2021” from the American Political Thought Almanac.
Shanna Rose
Tuohy Associate Professor of Government and Management | Government Department, CMC
Shanna Rose (B.A. Swarthmore College; Ph.D. Harvard University) is the Alice Tweed Tuohy Professor of Management and Government and director of CMC’s public policy major. Her areas of expertise include American politics, federalism, health care policy, social welfare policy, and budget policy. She is the author of Responsive States: Federalism and American Public Policy (with Andrew Karch) (Cambridge 2019) and Financing Medicaid: Federalism and the Growth of America’s Health Care Safety Net (Michigan 2013). Her latest book manuscript, on the politics of minimum wage policy in the United States, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Professor Rose teaches courses on public policy analysis, empirical methods, and state and local politics and policy. She has earned several college-wide awards including CMC’s Roy P. Crocker Award for Service, Professor of the Year at NYU-Wagner, and the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Student Teaching at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Andrew Sinclair (B.A. Claremont McKenna College; M.S. and Ph.D. Caltech) is an assistant professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College. His research focuses on American politics and public policy, with a particular emphasis on political reform. He is a co-author, along with Michael Alvarez, of Nonpartisan Primary Election Reform: Mitigating Mischief (Cambridge 2015). Recent work has continued to examine electoral reforms and political behavior, including a paper coauthored with Betsy Sinclair: “Primaries and Populism: Voter Efficacy, Champions, and Election Rules” (Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, 2(3) 2021: 365-388). In addition, he has continued to examine the democratic aspects of reform in public administration, coauthoring with Maya Love and María Gutiérrez-Vera “Federalism, Defunding the Police, and Democratic Values: A Functional Accountability Framework for Analyzing Police Reform Proposals” (Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 51(3) 2021: 484-511). Before joining the faculty at CMC, he was a Clinical Assistant Professor at NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
Sinclair is the Rose Institute’s polling director.
Faculty Affiliates
Eric Helland
William F. Podlich Professor of Economics | Robert Day School of Economics and Finance, CMC
Eric Helland (B.A. University of Missouri; M.A., and Ph.D. Washington University) is the William F. Podlich Professor of Economics and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College. Dr. Helland’s research primarily focuses on law and economics, microeconomics, business law, contract economics, and health economics. His publications include “Legal Outcomes and Home Court Advantage: Evidence from the SEC’s Shift to Administrative Courts” with George Vojta, forthcoming (Journal of Law and Economics), “Physician use of homestead laws to shield assets from medical malpractice liability: evidence from physician home values,” with Anupam B. Jena, Dan Ly, and Seth A. Seabury, forthcoming (Journal of Legal Studies), “Government Opioid Litigation: The Extent of Liability,” with Rebecca L. Haffajee and Beau Kilmer, (DePaul Law Review 2020), “What Can DNA Exonerations Tell Us about Racial Differences in Wrongful-Conviction Rates?,” with David Bjerk, (Journal of Law and Economics 2020), and “Unintended Consequences of Products Liability: Evidence from the Pharmaceutical Market,” with Darius Lakdawalla, Anup Malani, and Seth Seabury, (Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 2020).
Manfred Keil
Associate Professor | Robert Day School of Economics and Finance, CMC
Manfred Keil (Zwischenprüfung, Goethe Universität; M.A. University of Texas; M.S. and Ph.D. London School of Economics) is an Associate Professor and Chairman of the Robert Day School of Economics and Finance and associate director of the Lowe Institute of Political Economy at Claremont McKenna College. Dr. Keil’s main areas of expertise include banking, comparative economic performance, macroeconomics, and statistics. His publications include “An Investigation into the Probability That This is the Last Year of an Economic Expansion,” with Edward Leamer and Yao Li, (Journal of Forecasting 2023), “Measures of Financial Openness and Interdependence,” with W. Clark, M. Hallerberg, and Tom Willett, (Journal of Financial Economic Policy, 2011), “International and Intra Regional Interest Rate Interdependence in Asia: Methodological Issues and Empirical Results,” with Amnat Phalapleewan, Ramkishen Rajan, and Thomas Willett, (Korea Institute for International Policy (KIEP) 2005), and “Shrunken Earnings Predictions are Better Predictions,” with Margaret Hwang and Gary Smith, (Applied Financial Economics 2004). He is the chief economist for the Inland Empire Economic Partnership and representative for Riverside and San Bernardino counties at the Southern California Association of Governments.
John J. Pitney, Jr.
Roy P. Crocker Professor of Politics | Government Department, CMC
John J. Pitney, Jr. (B.A. Union College; M.A., M. Phil., and Ph.D. Yale University) is the Roy P. Crocker Professor of Politics at Claremont McKenna College. Dr. Pitney’s research primarily focuses on American and Californian politics, Congress, electoral politics, media politics, public policy, and political advertising. His publications include Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics (Rowman and Littlefield 2021) (with Andrew E. Busch); Un-American: The Fake Patriotism of Donald J. Trump (Rowman and Littlefield 2020); After Reagan: Bush, Dukakis, and the 1988 Election (Kansas 2019); Is Congress Broken? The Virtues and Defects of Partisanship and Gridlock (Brookings 2017) (co-edited with William F. Connelly, Jr. and Gary J. Schmitt); The Politics of Autism: Navigating the Contested Spectrum (Rowman and Littlefield 2015); and The Art of Political Warfare (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000). Among other honors, Dr. Pitney is a two-time recipient of CMC’s Glenn R. Huntoon Teaching Award and received CMC’s Presidential Award in 2013.