Catherine Bolzendahl

My research stands at the intersection of political sociology and the sociology of gender, framing gender as a fundamental basis of inequality and source of societal change. Within this broader focus, my work may be characterized along three main lines: 1) The importance of gender equality for welfare state spending and development; 2) Changing notions of citizenship, political participation and gender inequality; 3) Family as a site of inequality according to gender, political rights and sexual orientation. Past work has been  published in a variety of outlets including Social Forces, Social Politics, the European Sociological Review, the British Journal of Sociology, Social Science Quarterly, and Sociological Perspectives.

My coauthored book Counted Out: Same Sex Relations and Americans’ Definitions of Family has won book awards from the American Sociological Association, the Midwest Sociological Society and the North Central Sociological Association. Our findings have also been covered in a variety of news outlets including Newsweek, The New York Times, ABC News, MSNBC, and C-SPAN.

Currently I am working on a number of projects, including research with Hilde Coffé (Utrecht University) examining sources of support for women’s institutional equality in sub-Saharan African nations and comparative variation in support as linked to macro-indicators of gender equality; work testing the influence of  women’s equality on cash and services benefit generosity in 22 Western democracies since 1960; and work investigating the organizational and institutional creation of gender regimes across German, Swedish and U.S. legislative committee systems since 1970.

At the undergraduate level I teach a large, upper division course on the Sociology of Gender as well as courses in the required Statistics and Probability series (10 A/B/C) for Sociology majors. At the graduate level I teach Political Sociology with Edwin Amenta; seminar courses on Gender, Family and the Welfare State, Causes and Consequences of Women’s Political Representation, and the Sociology of the Welfare State, and a research practicum course on the Sociology of Family.