Lynne E. Ford
Dr. Lynne E. Ford is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the College of Charleston (SC).
Dr. Ford received degrees in political science from The Pennsylvania State University (BA, 1983) and the University of Maryland, College Park (MA, 1987; PhD, 1991). She began her appointment to the faculty of the College of Charleston in August, 1991. Dr. Ford served as chair of the department from 2000-2008.
Broadly trained in American politics, Dr. Ford's teaching interests include political behavior, elections and public opinion, women and politics, and research methods. Dr. Ford's research has developed along two paths: the role of community service in political education and women's engagement with politics. The second stream of research largely concerns women's paths to political power. Based on a 1992 original survey of all sitting female U.S. state legislators, Ford and co-author Kathleen Dolan developed an analysis of how women in politics differ from one another across cohorts. Previous literature on women and politics focused exclusively on how women differed from their male colleagues, assuming that women were more alike than different. This line of research resulted in several articles and book chapters. Dr. Ford is the author of Women and Politics: the Pursuit of Equality (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2nd edition, 2006), designed to serve as a core text in upper division undergraduate courses and The Encyclopedia of Women and American Politics (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2008). New research focuses on women's under representation in political office in the American South and comparative analyses of work-family policy in the United States and elsewhere.