Joel Rogers is an American academic and political activist. He currently is a professor of law, political science, and sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and has written on American politics and public policy.
Rogers received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University, his Master of Arts and Ph.D. from Princeton, and his J.D. from Yale Law School.
He is also the founder and director of a research and policy center, the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS), at UW–Madison. Rogers has written widely on American politics and public policy, political theory, and U.S. and comparative industrial relations, as well as the “high-road” approach to economic development he is credited as first theorizing. His most recent books are Working Capital: Using the Power of Labor’s Pensions (Cornell, 2001) and America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters (Basic, 2000), which he co-wrote with Ruy Teixeira.
In 1997, he unsuccessfully challenged laws against electoral fusion in the state of Minnesota. The case, Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party, went to the Supreme Court, where in a 6-3 vote, the Court decided that fusion is not a civil right protected by the Constitution.
A contributing editor of The Nation and Boston Review, and a social activist as well as an academic, Rogers was identified by Newsweek as one of 100 Americans most likely to affect U.S. politics and culture in the 21st century.
