Karen Mossberger

Karen Mossberger (born September 15, 1954) is an American political scientist and scholar of public policy and public administration. She is the Frank and June Sackton Professor of Urban Policy at Arizona State University, where she is also Director of the School of Public Affairs and a Distinguished Sustainability Scholar at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. During the 1992–1993 academic year, she was a visiting researcher at the University of Strathclyde. The book studies how the concept of enterprise zones spread in the United States, using the tools of policy diffusion. Mossberger focuses on five states from 1981 to 1993: Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, and Virginia. As part of her analysis of the diffusion and implementation of this idea throughout several regions, Mossberger also draws conclusions about the dynamics of decision-making in a federalist system, and under what conditions these decisions are rational, boundedly rational, or anarchic.

In 2013, together with Caroline Tolbert and William Franko, Mossberger published the book Digital Cities: The Internet and the Geography of Opportunity. The book defines the notion of "digital citizenship" to capture the extent to which individuals are capable of regularly and effectively using technology related to the internet. The authors focus on inequality in peoples' capacities to use internet technologies; Zachary Spicer, in a review of the book, wrote that they demonstrate that "America is falling short in these areas and, as a result, information inequities are developing that could have deep and lasting impacts on the social fabric of the country." The paper was also listed as a Classic Paper by Google Scholar, which recognizes "highly-cited papers in their area of research that have stood the test of time". Her 2005 paper "Race, Place, and Information Technology" received the 2005 Best Paper Award from the Public Policy Section of the American Political Science Association.

In 2016,

Mossberger's work has been cited, or she has been quoted, in news outlets like the Chicago Tribune, FiveThirtyEight, Vocativ, and The Week.

Selected works The Politics of Ideas and the Spread of Enterprise Zones (2000) "The Effects of E-Government on Trust and Confidence in Government", Public Administration Review, with Caroline J. Tolbert (2006) Digital Citizenship: The Internet, Society and Participation, with Caroline J. Tolbert and Ramona S. McNeal (2008)

Selected awards Fellow, National Academy of Public Administration Author of a Google Scholar Classic Paper