Susan M. Hoffmann is Associate Professor of Political Science at
Western Michigan University, where she teaches U.S. domestic public
policy and urban politics. She has been a practicing urban planner, serving
the City of Cleveland in the roles of neighborhood planner, manager
of neighborhood planning for the City Planning Commission, and capital
budget manager in the city’s budget office. She also worked in the
field for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as a
housing rehabilitation specialist.
Her scholarly research focuses on the intersection of public policy and
public administration in the design of financial institutions. She seeks to
highlight that financial institutions are largely constructs of public policy,
and that they have distributional impacts for people, places and functions.
Her publications include Politics and Banking: Ideas, Public Policy
and the Creation of Financial Institutions (Johns Hopkins, 2001) on the
influence of ideology in shaping financial regulatory frameworks; several
pieces on GSE’s in the Public Administration Review; and with Mark K. Cassell, a book forthcoming from SUNY Press on mission expansion in the Federal Home Loan Bank System.
Dr. Hoffmann holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1998) and a Master of Urban Planning degree from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (1978).