Sheri Berman
Associate Professor of Political Science
Barnard College, Columbia University
sberman@barnard.edu

I am an associate professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University in New York City.
My research interests include political development, European politics, comparative political economy and the history of the left.

My first book, The Social Democratic Moment, explains why the Swedish and German social democratic parties made such different choices during the interwar era. My focus is on their differing ideas about politics and economics (their "programmatic beliefs"). I argue that largely as a result of these ideas the Swedish Social Democrats placed themselves at the forefront of the drive for democratization; a decade later they responded to the Depression with a bold new economic program and used it to build a long period of political hegemony. The German Social Democrats, on the other hand, had democracy thrust upon them and then dithered when faced with economic crisis; their haplessness cleared the way for a bolder and more skillful political leader-- Adolf Hitler.

My second book, The Primacy of Politics. Social Democracy and the Making of Europe's Twentieth Century, examines the history of social democracy from its origins in the late nineteenth century to today and shows how it beat out competitors such as classical liberalism, orthodox Marxism, and its cousins, fascism and National Socialism, by solving the central challenge of modern politics: reconciling the competing needs of capitalism and democracy.