Paul R. Abramson

Paul R. Abramson is a Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University.

Abramson joined the Michigan State University faculty in 1967 as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1971 and to Professor in 1977. In 1987-88 he was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and from October 1994 through January 1995 he was a Lady Davis Professor in the Department of Political Science at The Hebrew University.

Abramson received his B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis in 1959, where he graduated as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He attended the University of California at Berkeley as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in 1959-60. From the fall of 1960 until the fall of 1962 he served as a Lieutenant in the United States Army, and was promoted to Captain in the U.S. Army Reserves in 1966. He earned an M.A. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1961 and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1967. Abramson is author of Generational Change in American Politics (1975), The Political Socialization of Black Americans (1977), and Political Attitudes in America (1983), and coauthor (with Ronald Inglehart) of Value Change in Global Perspective (1995) and of a series of fourteen books (with John H. Aldrich and David W. Rohde) on presidential and congressional elections, the most recent of which is Change and Continuity in the 2004 and 2006 Elections (2007). He is the author or coauthor of more than seventy journal articles, including sixteen in the American Political Science Review.

Abramson is currently studying political change in the party systems of the United States, Western Europe, and Israel. Along with Aldrich and Rohde he is writing a book on the 2008 U.S. presidential and congressional elections.