Quinn Mulroy

Biography

Quinn Mulroy is a political scientist who studies the political development of racial equity policies and programs in educational, workplace, and housing settings, and the institutions that carry them out. Her research often takes a historical approach, and focuses on how political ideas about what equal opportunity means in America are reshaped in the implementation of policy over time.

Her first book, Agents of Justice: How the American Bureaucracy Mobilizes Private Lawsuits to Make Policy Work, is forthcoming in summer 2025 with the Studies in Post-War American Political Development series at Oxford University Press. In the last half century since the height of the rights revolution - a period in the U.S. marked by significant rights expansions but limited government capacity to enforce them - efforts to defend individuals' and communities' rights have hinged on the effectiveness of the "litigation state:" a fragile but sometimes powerful mode of governance that relies on private litigants and their attorneys, rather than agencies, to enforce the laws of the land. In Agents of Justice, Mulroy argues that this system of governance was built and shaped by the concerted, mission-driven efforts of the agency officials who have largely been written out of the story of the litigation state. She traces how constrained administrators at civil rights and environmental agencies established during the rights revolution developed creative strategies for mobilizing mass private legal activity on the statutes they administer, generating significant, societal-level regulatory effects. In doing so, they acted as “agents of justice.” Mulroy builds new theory on and provides an archival analysis of the origins and development of the litigation state, challenging the conventional view that it was created to circumvent the bureaucracy and durably insulate private regulatory action in the courts. Through comparative case studies of the agencies charged with combatting employment discrimination, environmental degradation, and housing discrimination, she uncovers the pivotal, but quite hidden, role of agency officials in building, sustaining and, at times, even weakening private legal activity over time. Previous versions of this research project received the Leonard D. White Best Dissertation Award from the American Political Science Association (APSA), and a Best Conference Paper Award from APSA’s Law & Courts Section.

Mulroy’s latest book project, with Heather McCambly (University of Pittsburgh), examines the rise of, what they call, a regime of “(e)quality politics" in current-day debates over educational and employment policy. In the face of mounting attacks on equity policies and programming in schools, universities, and workplaces, Mulroy and McCambly argue that the current anti-DEI movement can be best understood as the latest incarnation of a historical pattern of political backlash to equity policies–one that uses warnings of an educational and workplace “quality crisis” to roll back equity-focused policy and programs. They find these backlashes are defined by a process of (e)quality politics, which is characterized by the institutionalization of a policy paradigm that deprioritizes equity goals in the name of protecting the putative “quality” of high-status institutions such that, in the end, quality becomes a race-evasive shorthand for race-based stratification. Using archival materials from government, organizational, and personal document collections, they trace how decisionmakers operating in the last stages of an (e)quality politics process shift investments toward the construction of quality measures and standards that, ultimately, help to preserve the status of white-serving institutions. Research from this project received the 2022 David Brian Robertson Best Paper Award from APSA's Politics and History Section.

Mulroy's research has appeared in leading political science and education journals, including The Journal of Politics, Studies in American Political Development, The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, Educational Researcher, and Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, the American Bar Foundation, Princeton University’s Law and Public Affairs Program, the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University, and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy.

Mulroy earned her bachelor's degree in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and her doctorate in political science from Columbia University. Before joining SESP, she was an assistant professor at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.

Education

• Ph.D., Political Science, Columbia University, 2012
• B.A., Political Science, University of California-Berkeley, 2001

Awards and Honors

• Ver Steeg Faculty Award, The Graduate School, Northwestern University, 2024 (annual university-wide award that recognizes one outstanding graduate faculty member for excellence in working with graduate students).
• David Brian Robertson Award, Best Conference Paper in Politics and History, American Political Science Association, 2022.
• Outstanding Professor Award, School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University, 2018.
• Best Conference Paper Award, American Political Science Association, Law and Courts Section, 2012.
• Leonard D. White Best Dissertation Award, American Political Science Association, 2012.
• National Fellowship in Politics and History, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, 2010-11.

Selected Publications

Mulroy, Quinn. Agents of Justice: How the American Bureaucracy Mobilizes Private Lawsuits to Make Policy Work. (New York: Oxford University Press). Forthcoming in Summer 2025.

​​McCambly, Heather and Quinn Mulroy. “The Rise of (E)Quality Politics on College Campuses: Then and Now,” Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, Special Issue on “Ideas and Ideologies in Higher Education Policy,” v. 56, no. 6 (2024): 19-24. 

Cowhy, Jennifer, Quinn Mulroy, and Tabitha Bonilla. “Conceptualizing Parents as Policy Agents in Special Education,” Educational Researcher, v. 53, no. 5 (2024): 319-25.

McCambly, Heather and Quinn Mulroy. “Constructing a “Quality” Education Crisis: (E)quality Politics and Racialization Beyond Target Beneficiaries,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Special Issue on "Critical Approaches to Education Policy Research," v. 46, no, 2 (2024): 192-221.

Nuamah, Sally and Quinn Mulroy. “‘I am a Child!’: Public Perceptions of Black Girls and their Punitive Consequences,” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, v. 8, no. 2 (2023): 182-201.

Mulroy, Quinn and Shana Gadarian. “Off to the Courts? Or the Agency? Public Attitudes on Legal and Bureaucratic Approaches to Policy Implementation,” Laws, Special Issue on "Intersection between Law, Politics and Public Policy," v. 7 (2018): 1-18.

Mulroy, Quinn. “Approaches to Enforcing the Rights Revolution: Private Civil Rights Litigation and the American Bureaucracy,” in The Rights Revolution Revisited: Perspectives on the Role of Private Enforcement of Civil Rights in the U.S., ed. Lynda Dodd, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018): 27-45.

Katznelson, Ira and Quinn Mulroy. “Was the South Pivotal? Situated Partisanship and Policy Coalitions during the New Deal and Fair Deal,” Journal of Politics, v. 74, no. 2 (2012): 604-620.

Bimes, Terri and Quinn Mulroy. “The Rise and Decline of Presidential Populism,” Studies in American Political Development, v. 18, no. 2 (2004): 136-59.