The Ithiel de Sola Pool Award and Lectureship is presented triennially by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor a scholar whose research explores a broad range of fields pursued by Ithiel de Sola Pool; including political theory, political behavior, political communication, science and technology policy, and international affairs. Professor Donald Kinder will deliver the Pool Lecture on Friday, September 12th at 2pm PDT as part of the APSA Annual Meeting.
Citation from the Award Committee:
We are delighted to select Professor Donald Kinder for the 2025 Ithiel de Sola Pool Award.
The triennial Pool Award honors a scholar whose research, like that of the late Professor Pool himself, “explores a broad range of fields including political theory, political behavior, political communication, science and technology policy, and international affairs.” Several of this year’s nominees have produced work over many years that meet that criterion. Professor Kinder wins the prize because, in our judgment, his contributions are so broad and deep, so seminal, and so enduring.
He is an established expert in political psychology, elections, public opinion, voting behavior, media and politics, and racial politics. His work has set the standard for theoretically rigorous, politically relevant research in American political behavior.
Kinder’s most wide-reaching intellectual contribution is probably methodological. The use of experimental methods in political psychology has grown massively over in the last several decades. Kinder stands out as one of those early pioneers who nurtured the growth of this methodology in political science. News that Matters (Iyengar and Kinder 1987) and Experimental Foundations of Political Science (Kinder and Palfrey 1993) have played a role equaled by none in establishing the case for experimental research in the field. Importantly, Kinder has made the case for experimental methods to be used alongside, not instead of, other methods (Kinder 2011), and he has argued for the intentional crafting of experiments that shed light upon contemporary politics (Kinder 2007). Anyone doing experiments in political psychology, political communication, and political behavior owes a tremendous intellectual debt to Donald Kinder, who paved the way for this innovative method to become a standard tool in a behavioralist’s methodological toolkit.
Substantively, Kinder has contributed to knowledge across a range of important topics. Political communication is certainly one. News that Matters was Kinder’s first book, co- authored with Shanto Iyengar. It helped revive what was a moribund political science literature on media effects and political communication. Their framework for investigating media effects (priming, agenda-setting, and framing) has become a standard one for the field and has inspired numerous investigations into the ways in which the media and political campaigns affect citizens. News that Matters received the 2004 Converse Book Award from EPOVB and the 2009 AAPOR Book Award, was republished as an updated edition in 2010, and has been cited more than 2,500 times, according to Google Scholar. Kinder’s impact on political communication and the study of it continue to this day.
Kinder has also established a lasting influence on the study of intergroup relations. He published important and influential work on symbolic racism and racial resentment, from his early work with David Sears (Sears and Kinder 1971; Kinder and Sears 1981; Sears and Kinder 1985) to his work with Lynn Sanders (Kinder and Sanders 1990, 1996), to his book with Allison Dale-Riddle on the 2008 election, to his current project, which confronts Gunnar Myrdal’s prediction that racial prejudice would dissipate in American society and the American Creed would prevail (e.g., Kinder and Drake 2009). This corpus of work argues for the role of symbolic racism/racial resentment in policy opinions and candidate evaluations. Moreover, Kinder has continued to contribute to the intellectual project, as his work addresses the intersection of race and contemporary politics (Kinder and Dale-Riddle 2012; Kinder and Chudy 2016) as well as innovations in psychological theory and measurement (Kinder and Ryan 2017). Kinder has also broadened his engagement with intergroup relations beyond race, as evidenced in his book and articles with Kam (Kinder and Kam 2009; Kam and Kinder 2007, 2013) on ethnocentrism and his ongoing collaboration on gender with Nancy Burns (Burns et al. 2016).
In addition, we also note contributions in many other domains. Consider Kinder’s work on economic voting, particularly in the development of the concept of sociotropic voting Kinder and Kiewiet 1979, 1981; Kinder and Mebane 1983). This concept has become the standard account of economic voting in elections, both in the United States and abroad. Kinder’s work on political person perception (Kinder 1978; Kinder et al. 1980; Abelson et al. 1982) has established the accepted typology of how individuals perceive and evaluate political candidates. And finally, consider Kinder’s work on belief systems, encapsulated most recently in his book with Kalmoe (Kinder and Kalmoe 2017) and also on display in a number of masterfully crafted review pieces including “Diversity and complexity in American public opinion” (1983 Political Science: The State of the Discipline), “Public opinion and political action” (1985 Handbook of Social Psychology), “Communication and opinion” (1998 Annual Review of Political Science), “Opinion and action in the realm of politics” (1998 Handbook of Social Psychology), and “Communication and politics” (2003 Handbook of Political Psychology).
These are only some of the many scholarly contributions Kinder has made thus far in his career. We say “thus far” intentionally, as he is still working away, with at least two book manuscripts currently in progress, even after moving to emeritus status. In addition to this significant body of research, Kinder has contributed to the discipline at large. He served on the American National Election Studies Board of Overseers for many years and took on the duty of Co-Principal Investigator of the ANES for 13 years. Kinder has been a generous and supportive mentor to a long list of successful and diverse graduate students, many of whom have had the pleasure and privilege of co-authoring with him.
In a field of strong nominees, Professor Donald Kinder stood out. We join a large number of scholars in gratitude to him for his many profound contributions to our discipline.
Donald Kinder is the Philip E. Converse Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan, Emeritus. He received his PhD in Social Psychology in 1975 from UCLA. Kinder has published six books: News that Matters (with Shanto Iyengar), Experimental Foundations of Political Science (with Thomas R. Palfrey), Divided by Color (with Lynn M. Sanders), Us against Them (with Cindy D. Kam), The End of Race? (with Allison Dale- Riddle), and Neither Liberal nor Conservative (with Nathan Kalmoe). He is the author of over 50 articles and book chapters, many having appeared in the field’s most prestigious journals (including the APSR, AJPS, JOP, and JPSP). He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Darrell West (Chair) of the Brookings Institution, Dr. Jennifer Clark of the University of Houston, and Dr. John Owen of the University of Virginia