David M. Glick

I am a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Boston University.  I am currently a Fellow with the Office of Evaluation Sciences in the General Services Administration  where I do applied policy work, and one of the Principal Investigators on the annual Menino Survey of Mayors. My research focused on political institutions – especially courts, public opinion about institutions, local politics and policy, policy diffusion, and law. I teach undergraduate courses about law (Constitutional Law, Civil Liberties, Judicial Politics), and local government. My local government courses includea project based local policy lab course and a co-taught class about all of the politics, policy, and social science in HBO’s the Wire (named “coolest class to take at BU” by Boston.com) .  I was also the Founding Faculty Director of a program called MetroBridge that pairs BU courses across levels and disciplines with local governments to bring real, applied, policy relevant research into BU classrooms. You can view my CV here

Much of my most recent work focuses on urban politics and policy, especially  housing and development, with my colleagues Katherine Einstein and Maxwell Palmer. This work includes our book, Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis, (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

More generally, my research has appeared in journals such as Nature, PNAS, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, Perspectives on Politics,  Political Behavior, Public Opinion Quarterly, and the Urban Affairs Review. 

I grew up near Boston and now live in Rhode Island with my wife and three young children. Before graduate school at Princeton I was an undergraduate at Williams College and worked in Cambridge for two years as a strategy consultant with the Monitor Group. I also spent two years as a fellow at the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy at Dartmouth. I’ve retired from playing pickup basketball with college kids (family plus retina surgery), but still play soccer in a Sunday morning “Over the Hill” league and have taken up running as partial substitute for playing more team sports,