Stephanie L. Mudge

About

Stephanie L. Mudge is Associate Professor of Sociology and Series Co-editor (with Anthony Chen) of Cambridge Studies in Historical Sociology. She is a historical, political, and economic sociologist specialized in sociological theory, the historical formation of party politics in the United States and Western Europe, economic ideologies and institutions, monetary government, and the relationship between politics and expertise. 

Prof Mudge completed her PhD in sociology at UC-Berkeley and has held visiting positions and postdoctoral fellowships at New York University in Abu Dhabi, MaxPo/Sciences Po (Paris), the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI, UK), the Max Planck Center for the Study of Societies (MPIfG, Cologne, Germany), and the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). 

In 2026-2027, Prof Mudge is serving as the elected Chair of the Political Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.

Research Focus

Prof Mudge's first book, Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism (2018, Harvard University Press), develops a century-long comparative, historical, and biographically-sensitive analysis of the American Democrats, the German and Swedish Social Democrats, and the British Labour Party. Focusing on the central role experts play as interpreters, representatives, and spokespersons inside political parties, the book tracks how close mid-20th Century ties between economics professions and center-left parties hitched their fates to each other--such that when economics changed, left parties changed with it. The result was a new role for economists as spokespersons for markets and, alongside them, the rise of new strategic experts and policy specialists who spoke for 'what wins' and 'what works.' The result, however, was a declining capacity to meaningfully represent the historical poor, working, and middle-class constituencies of left parties.

• Leftism Reinvented won the 2019 Barrington Moore Award in Comparative Historical Sociology and the 2019 Distinguished Contribution Award in Political Sociology from the American Sociological Association (ASA). It also received an honorable mention for the ASA's 2019 Viviana Zelizer Award in Economic Sociology.
• You can hear Prof Mudge talk with host Daniel Denvir about Leftism Reinvented on The Dig, or read about it in Accounts (the ASA's Economic Sociology newsletter) or in an interview with Chase Burghgrave at Jacobin Magazine.

Prof Mudge's other past and ongoing projects include:

• the definition, conceptualization, and analysis of neoliberalism (see also here), political parties (with Anthony Chen) and the relationship between states, politics, and expertise
• how Bitcoin transformed from a movement to an asset (with Christopher Lawrence)
• the historical formation, theoretical concerns, and Marxian political economy-avoidance tendencies of economic sociology (also with Christopher Lawrence)
• the historical role of experts and expertise in European integration (with Antoine Vauchez)
• central banking and monetary government, with emphasis on the European Central Bank (ECB) (also with Antoine Vauchez; more articles on the topic can be found here and here)
• the colonial imprint and contemporary dynamics of international financial sanctioning (in progress)
• the epistemology and ethics of sociological political economy, and
• the Democratic intra-party origins of the Marshall Plan (with David McCourt)
• Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the political, the economic, and the relationship between them (in progress)
• how sociological political economy can be usefully informed by Erving Goffman's concept of the person (in progress)
• computational measurement of the formation of the American political field between 1872 and 1928 (in progress)

Mudge's newest initiative, with help from the UC Davis DataLab and UCD Sociology graduate student Shahar Zaken, is called the Strategy & Democracy (S&D) Project. One component focuses empirically on the 19th and early 20th Century United States, which uses historical newspapers and computational methods to map the dynamic relationship between financial institutions (especially, money) and democratic politics. A second component focuses on the origins and historical formation of strategic experts and expertise in democratic politics.

The S&D Project follows up on a hypothesis developed in Leftism Reinvented--namely, that when financial interests dominate democratic politics, strategic experts focused on winning and holding political power come to the fore. In other words, the strategic expert is a person-level, political expression of financial power.

The S&D project is grounded in a deep reading and reconstruction of Bourdieu's field theory that draws, also on other thinkers, including Karl Polanyi, WEB Du Bois, and Erving Goffman. Central theoretical concerns are the relationship between the political and economic fields, the concept of the person, and doing person-level political economy. 

Publications

(See book/articles linked above.)

Teaching

Prof Mudge teaches courses in sociological theory, economic sociology, political sociology, political economy, and social problems.