Sarah Anderson, Assistant Professor – Environmental Politics

Sarah Anderson arrived at the Bren School in 2007, bringing valuable expertise in political structures and dynamics, which profoundly influence environmental policy. She is also affiliated with the Department of Political Science. Her research interests include legislatures, political parties, public policy, statistical methods, and environmental politics. Those interests are reflected in her experience in Washington, D.C., where she worked as a U.S. congressman’s legislative assistant and also researched legislation to brief members of the House National Parks and Public Lands Subcommittee. Her current projects include an extension of her dissertation work, in which she analyzed (and found serious limitations to) the three main models for predicting government spending at the level of appropriations bills. In other projects, she is working to quantify the impact of environmentally concerned constituents on congressional voting, and seeking to determine the degree to which environmental voting, agricultural voting, and voting in other policy areas reflect more general voting in Congress. In addition to a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University, she holds an M.S. in Economics from Stanford University and a B.S. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.