[3] Schmidt received her Bachelor of Arts from Bryn Mawr College, and both her Masters and PhD from the University of Chicago.

[4] In 2018 Schmidt received a Guggenheim Fellowship for a book project on “The Rhetoric of Discontent: A Transatlantic Inquiry into the West’s Crisis of Democratic Capitalism” and was named by the President of the French Republic as a Chevalier in the Legion of Honor.

She is past head of the European Union Studies Association and sits on numerous editorial and advisory boards, including the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, the Brussels Foundation for European Progressive Studies, the Vienna Institute for Peace, and the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute.

The three principal areas of interest that have defined her intellectual and academic trajectory are: European integration and its impact on national policies, processes, and democracy; European and national political economic and social policies; and the epistemological and methodological underpinnings of such research in ‘institutional theory.’ Schmidt's interest in institutional theory and epistemology, and her highly innovative discursive institutionalism, began with her PhD dissertation, which was focused on the philosophy of science and its implications for explanation in the social sciences, and political science in particular.

It argues that while the terms of the policy debates pitting national unity against local liberty were set by the French Revolution, the legislative history was one in which political interest consistently trumped political principle except at two critical moments: in the 1870-80s, consecrating local democratic power through the election of the mayor; and in the 1980s, eliminating the prefect's a priori control plus establishing the election of the presidents of regions and departments.

This is about the quality of the policymaking processes, including their efficacy, accountability, inclusiveness, and openness to interest consultation with the people.

Schmidt's work on European political economic and social policies began with her second book From State to Market?

In the interim, she also co-directed an international research project at the Max Planck Institute in Cologne that resulted in a two-volume study, Welfare and Work in the Open Economy[10] (co-edited with F. W. Scharpf, Oxford 2000) on the impact of international economic pressures on national social policy in twelve advanced industrialized countries.

More recently, Schmidt co-directed a collaborative project that resulted in Resilient Liberalism in Europe’s Political Economy[11] (co-edited with M. Thatcher—Cambridge 2013), which offers five lines of analysis to explain the resilience of neo-liberal ideas: their ideational adaptability, their rhetoric without the reality of implementation, their dominance in debates, their strategic use by interests, and their embedding in institutions.

This may occur directly, say, by elite actors’ coercive power to impose their ideas by monopolizing public discourse and action (often as an addition to their material resources for coercion), or indirectly, by actors shaming opponents into conformity (e.g., when social movements push elites to adopt their ideas and discourse) or by resisting alternative interpretations (e.g., when neo-liberal economists shut out neo-Keynesian alternatives).