About

Sarah F. Anzia is a Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy & Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her role involves engaging in research and teaching within the Goldman School of Public Policy, focusing on public policy and political science. The page does not provide specific details about her research focus, background, or key contributions, only her title and affiliation.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Economics
• Public administration
• Social psychology
• Geography
• Demographic economics
• Law
• Political economy

Selected publications

• The Growth of Public-Sector Unions in Early Twentieth-Century America

  Studies in American Political Development · 2025-07-21

  articleOpen access1st author

  Abstract With the passage of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the American labor movement cemented the right to form unions and engage in collective bargaining. However, the NLRA explicitly excluded the public sector. Government employees did not achieve similar legal protections until decades later, and even then, the laws varied considerably by state. Because of this, scholarly accounts of the development of public-sector unions usually start in the 1960s and emphasize how public- and private-sector unions developed along separate paths. In this article, we analyze a new dataset and show that hundreds of cities had organized workers during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, including firefighters, police, and other public-sector workers (like those in the sanitation and roads departments). By the 1950s, numerous employee unions had engaged in strikes and had achieved written agreements with their city employers. We also present evidence that public- and private-sector employee organization were correlated during this period. Thus, despite very different legal contexts before 1960, our evidence suggests that the timing and location of early public-sector organization may have had more in common with private-sector organization than is often recognized.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Politics of Problem Solving: Housing, Pensions, and the Organization of Interests

  The Forum · 2025-12-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Good governance and effective problem solving are important goals for American government, and one branch of political science that focuses on them is research on the politics of public policy. This essay summarizes important insights from that literature and illustrates their relevance to two problems: housing unaffordability and public pension underfunding. With housing unaffordability, problem-solving politics is currently activated, whereas with pension underfunding, it is not. To understand why, it is important to consider the features of the policy, the organization of interests, and the politics of problem creation. In the problem-creation stage, the two cases share much in common: they feature lopsided interest structures buttressed by longstanding institutions. But for the activation of problem-solving politics and what problem solving looks like, there are meaningful differences between the two. One difference relates to how the problems are experienced by the broader public. The other is that in one of the cases, the side with vested interest in the status quo is a well-organized interest group. In both cases, problem-solvers tend to emerge from political offices with broader constituencies: state-level offices for housing, and executives (governors and mayors) for pensions.

  PublisherDOI

• Means, Motives, and Opportunities: How Executives and Interest Groups Set Public Policy. By Christian Breunig and Chris Koski. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. 300p.

  Perspectives on Politics · 2025-02-25

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Labor’s Capital: Public Pensions and Private Equity

  The Forum · 2024-12-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article describes the large and growing interdependence of public pensions and private equity – and the unusual politics that drives it. By any definition, public pension funds represent government money: they are funded through contributions of government employers and employees for the purpose of providing retirement benefits to public-sector workers. Public-sector unions play important roles at virtually every stage of public pension management, from representing the beneficiaries in state and local politics to serving in fiduciary roles on pension governing boards. In a descriptive analysis, we show that public pensions have allocated increasing amounts of capital to private equity in the last two decades, regardless of the party in control of the state legislature, and even in states with strong public-sector unions. To explain this departure from the conventional left-right structure of American politics, we offer an account of the economic incentives that underpin public pensions’ increasing reliance on private equity – and how these developments stand to have enormous consequences for the American political economy. Here, we find entities with acrimonious relationships in public, partnering on over a trillion dollars of private investments. We see signs that public employee unions attempt to influence the practices of private equity-owned companies that employ an increasing share of the American workforce. We also detail how the retirements of millions of state and local government employees and the fiscal health of thousands of American governments are increasingly commingled with the fates of the private equity industry.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Civil Service Adoption in America: The Political Influence of City Employees

  American Political Science Review · 2024-05-27 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  At the turn of the twentieth century, most cities in America featured a patronage-based system of governance, but over the next few decades, patronage was replaced by civil service. Civil service restructured the relationship between elected officials and government employees, with employees benefiting from a variety of new protections. Yet in studying this change, scholars have largely ignored the role local employees themselves might have played in the transformation. We argue that city employees stood to benefit from civil service, and in places where they had agency and clout, they were important drivers of its adoption. We collected a dataset for more than 1,000 municipal governments, determining whether and when they adopted civil service and whether their employees were organized in an occupational organization. Our analysis of these new data shows the influence of city employees was an important contributor to the spread of civil service in American local government.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Public Schools and Their Pensions: How Is Pension Spending Affecting U.S. School Districts?

  Education Finance and Policy · 2023-09-22

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract State and local government decisions about how school funding is raised and allocated have profound impacts on American public education; in recent years, experts have documented large increases in one type of spending in particular: public pensions. Because most data on school district pension expenditures are at the state level, it has so far been difficult to assess what changes local school districts have made in response. In this paper, I analyze a new dataset of the annual pension expenditures of approximately 200 unified school districts across the United States from 2005 to 2016. Consistent with findings in the literature, I find that pension expenditures rose in real terms in most of them, but also that there has been significant variation in that growth. Moreover, in a descriptive analysis, I find that larger within-district pension expenditure growth is associated with (1) greater revenue growth in the subsequent year and (2) reductions in school district employment, mainly through reductions in the number of non-teaching staff. Finally, there is evidence that districts’ responses to rising pension expenditures may depend on state political institutions, in particular whether the states have mandatory collective bargaining for teachers.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Interest Groups in US Local Politics: Introduction to the Special Issue

  2023-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Age-group identity and political participation

  Research & Politics · 2023-04-01 · 13 citations

  articleOpen access

  In many ways, American democracy seems to work better for older citizens than younger citizens, and one explanation is that young adults vote at much lower rates than their older counterparts. Yet while the existence of the age gap in turnout is well established, there remains uncertainty as to what drives it. In this paper, we explore age as a potentially important group identity and evaluate whether strength of age-group identity predicts political participation. Adapting established measures in the social identity literature, we surveyed a representative sample of American adults to gauge how strongly they identified with others in their age group. We find that, on average, younger adults identify less strongly than senior citizens with others their age. However, for young adults, age-group identity is as strong as another form of group identity that has gotten considerable attention in the literature: political party identity. The strength of age-group identity also predicts both voting and participating in climate change protests, especially for young adults. Age-group identity is a stronger predictor of climate protest participation for young Republicans than young Democrats—suggesting there may be potential for a bipartisan coalition of young people active on the issue of climate change.

  PublisherDOI

• Interest Groups in U.S. Local Politics

  2023-01-01 · 3 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This book examine some of the interest groups that are commonly active in US local politic, such as tenant organizations, teachers' unions, and local PACs.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Replication Data for Age-Group Identity and Political Participation

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-03-03

  datasetOpen access

  The file "replication_code.R" can be used to replicate the tables and figures in the manuscript. It uses the following data sources, which are also provided in this replication package: "df.csv" -- This file contains data from a survey administered by YouGov in May, 2020. YouGov interviewed 2448 respondents who were then matched down to a sample of 2270 to produce the dataset. Respondents were matched to a sampling frame constructed by stratified sampling from the 2016 American Community Survey (ACS) 1-year sample by gender, age, race, and education. We over-sampled young adults (those aged 18-39) to increase statistical power for across-age comparisons.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Terry M. Moe

  19 shared

• Charlotte Hill

  University of California, Berkeley

  6 shared

• Samuel Trachtman

  5 shared

• Christopher R. Berry

  University of Chicago

  3 shared

• Rachel Bernhard

  University of Oxford

  2 shared

• JAKE ALTON JARES

  Stanford University

  2 shared

• Neil Malhotra

  2 shared

• Jeffrey R. Henig

  Columbia University

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Chancellor's Professor, UC Berkeley