Margaret Weir is Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She teaches courses on urban society and politics, political sociology, and the welfare state. Before coming to Berkeley in 1997, she was a Senior Fellow in Governmental Studies at the Brookings Institution (1992–1997) and was a member of the faculty of the Government Department at Harvard University (1985–1992). She has been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, and a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She is the recipient of grants from Ford Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, German Marshall Fund, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Science Research Council.

Weir has written widely on social policy and politics in the United States. She is the author of several books including, Schooling for All: Race, Class and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (coauthored with Ira Katznelson, Basic Books 1985); and Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States (Princeton University Press 1992). She has also edited several books that deal with development of social policy in the U.S. including, The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (with Ann Shola Orloff and Theda Skocpol, Princeton University Press 1988) and The Social Divide (Brookings and Russell Sage, 1998), which examines social policymaking during the Clinton administration.

She is currently working on a study of metropolitan inequalities in the United States, with a particular focus on the politics of coalition-building in metropolitan America during the past decade. From this work, she has published “Coalitions for Regionalism,” in Reflections on Regionalism, ed. Bruce Katz (Brookings Institution Press 2000) and “Power, Money, and Politics in Community Development,” in Urban Problems in Community Development, eds. Ronald R. Ferguson and William T. Dickens (Brookings Institution Press 1999); and “Planning, Environmentalism and Urban Poverty,” in The American Planning Tradition, ed. Robert Fishman (Woodrow Wilson Center Press 2000). Tentatively titled Challenging Metropolitan Inequalities, the book examines how changes in federalism affect coalition-building at the regional level, as old channels of channels of influence and resources decline. Through comparison of the Chicago and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, the book will examine the shifting alliances among low-income communities, organized labor, environmentalists, political leaders in cities and suburbs, and regional business leaders as they seek to shape metropolitan America to their own vision.