Political Science Faculty

Michael Hartney

Associate Professor

Biography

Michael Hartney joined the Boston College political sciencefaculty in fall 2017. Professor Hartney’s main research and teaching interestsinclude: state and local politics, interest groups, and public policy. Hisscholarship has been published in leading academic journals such as the AmericanJournal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review,Perspectives on Politics, and Public Administration Review andhas garnered coverage in the Economist, New York Times, WashingtonPost, and Wall Street Journal.

In 2022, the University of Chicago Press published his firstbook: How Policies Make Interest Groups: Governments, Unions, and AmericanEducation. The book explains the rise of teachers unions to their currentplace of status and influence in the United States, detailing how state andlocal governments adopted policies that subsidized—and in turn strengthened—thepower of unions in education politics.

At Boston College, Hartney teaches courses on the politicsof education, environmental policy, and US state and local politics. He is alsoa research affiliate at Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy andGovernance (PEPG), and, in 2020-21, a national fellow at Stanford University’sHoover Institution.

Prior to academia, Hartney worked as a policy analyst fortheNational Governors Association Center for Best Practices. At NGA, heprovided policy analysis togovernors on a wide range of K–12 schoolreform issues, from teacher andprincipal quality to high school redesign.Hartney holds a Ph.D. in politicalscience from the University of NotreDame and a bachelor’s degree, also inpolitical science, from VanderbiltUniversity.