Stephen Engel

Steve is a fifth-year PhD Candidate in American politics, with particular emphasis
on judicial politics, American political development, and social
movements, especially gay and lesbian politics. His secondary interests include
contemporary political theory and comparative politics. His dissertation
research explores inter-branch relations, especially recurrent periods
when the elected branches attempt to institutionally weaken the federal
judiciary.

Steve’s dissertation investigates the question: What explains the repeated recurrence, since the Federalist era, of attacks on the federal judiciary yet also the fact that such attacks seem to rarely materialize into actions taken that weaken judicial power? His intention is to contextualize what have been traditionally understood as attacks on the Court within a broader framework, to embed them within the institutional development not only of the judiciary and its relationship to the elected branches, but to the emergence of stable and legitimate partisanship. He aims to show how the extra-constitutional development of stable parties in the 1830s was layered upon the already existing constitutional institutions, reshaping the incentives and rational calculations of how actors in each institution view the other.

Steve’s book, The Unfinished Revolution: Social Movement Theory and the Gay and Lesbian Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2001), investigates how the gay and lesbian rights movements developed since World War II in both the United States and the United Kingdom with an eye toward analyzing how differences between a parliamentary and a separation-of-powers system may affect the developmental trajectories, aims, tactics, and strategies of social movements and their consequent interest group communities. His work has also appeared in Studies in American Political Development (Spring 2007), Journal of the Philosophy of Education (forthcoming), and Advertising and Society Review (Fall 2004).

During the 2007-2008 academic year, Steve is a doctoral research fellow at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago. He is also using a Dissertation Improvement Grant in Law and Social Science from the National Science Foundation (Grant: SES-0719031) to continue research on his dissertation this year.
Email: stephen.engel@yale.edu

Email: stephen.engel@yale.edu

Personal Web Page: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~se56

Mailing Address:
Department of Political Science
124 Prospect Street
PO Box 208301
New Haven, CT 06520-8301

Phone: 917-453-7716