Kent Weaver currently serves as Faculty Director for Executive Education and International Initiatives at the McCourt School of Public Policy. Weaver's major fields of interest are American and comparative social policy, comparative political institutions, and policy implementation. He is particularly interested in understanding how political institutions, feedbacks from past policy choices and the motivations of politicians interact to shape public policy choices. Much of his work has attempted to understand when and why politicians undertake actions that appear to offer more political risks than rewards. Weaver is the author or co-author of many books, including Policy Feedbacks, Ending Welfare As We Know It, Automatic Government: The Politics of Indexation, The Politics of Industrial Change, and Do Institutions Matter?: Government Capabilities in the U.S. and Abroad, as well as numerous articles in political science and public management journals. . He is currently completing a book on what the United States can learn from the experiences of other advanced industrial countries in reforming their public pension systems. Professor Weaver teaches courses for mid-career and Executive Education students at the McCourt School on Strategic Management of Policy Reform, Promoting Behavior Change, and Case Writing and Case Teaching for Public Policy. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University.
