Professor Snyder's primary research and teaching interests are in American politics, with a focus on political representation. He has written on a variety of topics, including elections, campaign finance, legislative behavior and institutions, interest groups, direct democracy, the media, and corruption. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, Econometrica, and many other other journals and edited volumes. He is co-author of The End of Inequality: One Person, One Vote and the Transformation of American Politics. Professor Snyder taught for six years in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, and for eighteen years in the Departments of Political Science and Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.