Alexander keyssar biography

Life.
Alexander Keyssar is the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy.
Alexander Keyssar is an American historian and the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

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A Compromised Institution: Alexander Keyssar's Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?

At the close of the 20th century, Alexander Keyssar found himself writing what would become the preeminent book on the history of enfranchisement in America. This had not been his original plan. He had spent years, in fact, working on a very different plan—“a highly quantitative study of working-class participation in electoral politics in the United States.” He set out to write a chapter summarizing the history of voting rights and found, to his dismay, that no such history had been written yet, and he would have to do his own original research to write it. The study on working class electoral participation has yet to be written, and that chapter became a book, The Right to Vote.

If there was a theme running through that book, it was that universal suffrage was not inevitable, and the expansion of the franchise was not a linear progression. In Keyssar’s history, expansions of the franchise almost always marched in lockstep with restrictions along other dimensions or in specif

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Alessandra Seiter: "For more than two centuries, "the United States has elected "its most powerful public official through a complex process "that has been widely criticized "and sometimes condemned outright, "a process that does not conform to democratic principles "the nation has publicly championed, "a process that is ill understood by many Americans, "bewildering to nearly everyone abroad, "and never imitated by another country "or by any state of the United States." This process is the Electoral College and this confounding description of it comes from the latest book by Alex Keyssar, Matthew W. Stirling, Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy school. The book's focus and title come from a question that has for years kept Professor Keyssar up at night: Why do we still have the Electoral College?

On this episode of Behind the Book, we speak with Professor Keyssar about this question and what it means for U.S. democracy.

The Electoral College refers to the process that has been used to choose the U.S. president every four years since 1787. When A

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Matthew W. Stirling, Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy

Contact:

Assistant: Scott Stackpole

Alexander Keyssar is the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy. An historian by training, he has specialized in the exploration of historical problems that have contemporary policy implications. His book, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (2000), was named the best book in U.S. history by both the American Historical Association and the Historical Society; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. A significantly revised and updated edition of The Right to Vote was published in 2009. His 1986 book, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts, was awarded three scholarly prizes. Keyssar is coauthor of The Way of the Ship: America's Maritime History Reenvisioned, 1600-2000 (2008), and of Inventing America, a text integrating the history of technology and science into the mainstream of American history. In addition, he has co-edite