Daniel Gillion

Daniel Q. Gillion is the Julie Beren Platt and Marc E. Platt Presidential Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Rochester, where he was the distinguished Provost Fellow. He later went on to become the Ford Foundation Fellow and the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at Harvard University as well as the CSDP Research Scholar at Princeton. He received the “brainy award” when he was selected as an Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2018-2020) award recipient.  He is the author of the recently published book The Loud Minority: Why Protest Matters in American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2020). A contemporary and more public-facing overview of the book can be found in the Atlantic. His research interests focus broadly on racial and ethnic politics, political protest, elections, political institutions, public policy, and the American presidency. Dr. Gillion’s first book, The Political Power of Protest: Minority Activism and Shifts in Public Policy (Cambridge University Press), demonstrates the influential role of protest to garner a response from each branch of the federal government, highlighting protest actions as another form of constituent sentiment that should be considered alongside public opinion and voting behavior. The Political Power of Protest was the winner of the 2014 Best Book Awardfrom the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. Dr. Gillion’s second book Governing with Words: The Political Dialogue on Race, Public Policy, and Inequality in America (Cambridge University Press) demonstrates that the political dialogue on race offered by presidents and congressional members alters the public policy process and shapes societal and cultural norms to improve the lives of racial and ethnic minorities, illustrating that mere words are a powerful tool for combating racial inequality in America. Governing with Words was awarded the 2017 W.E.B. Du Bois Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. Professor Gillion’s research has also been published in the academic journals Journal of Politics, British Journal of Politics, Electoral Studies, Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, and the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law as well as in the edited volumes of Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior. His research and political commentary have been widely cited in popular media outlets such as the New York Times, GQ Magazine, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, CBS News, among others.