Theda Skocpol (née Barron; May 4, 1947) is an American sociologist and political scientist, who is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. She is best known as an advocate of the historical-institutional and comparative approaches, as well as her "state autonomy theory". She has written widely for both popular and academic audiences. She has been President of the American Political Science Association and the Social Science History Association.

In historical sociology, Skocpol's works and opinions have been associated with the structuralist school. As an example, she argues that social revolutions can best be explained given their relation with specific structures of agricultural societies and their respective states. Such an approach differs greatly from more "behaviorist" ones, which tend to emphasize the role of "revolutionary populations", "revolutionary psychology", and/or "revolutionary consciousness", as determinant factors of revolutionary processes.

Her 1979 book States and Social Revolutions was influential in research on revolutions.

Theda Skocpol was born in Detroit, Michigan on May 4, 1947. Both of her parents, Jennie Mae Becker Barron and Allan Barron, were teachers. Her mother wanted her to study home economics at a small liberal arts college, while her father was concerned about the cost of college education. She earned her BA in sociology at Michigan State University in 1969. While she attended Michigan State, she participated in the antiwar movement in response to the Vietnam War. Through the Methodist student association, she went to Rust College, a historically black college in Holly Springs, Mississippi, to teach English and math to incoming freshmen. Many of the students were from sharecropper families, and were first-generation college students. She called her time in Mississippi observing racism and segregation "life-changing". She then went on to earn both her MA (1972) and PhD at Harvard University (1975). While attending Harvard, Skocpol studied with Barrington Moore Jr. Her first published article, in 1973, was a critique of Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Her PhD committee at Harvard were George Homans, Daniel Bell, and Seymour Martin Lipset.

From 1975 to 1981, Skocpol served as an assistant and associate professor of sociology, at Harvard. During this time, Skocpol published her first of many books, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of Social Revolutions in Russia, France and China (1979). Some of her subsequent work focused on methodology and theory, including the co-edited volume Bringing the State Back In, which heralded a new focus by social scientists on the state as an agent of social and political change.

In 1981, Skocpol moved on to work at the University of Chicago. For the next five years, Skocpol would serve as an associate professor of Sociology and Political Science, and of Social Science, and Director for the Center for the Study of Industrial Societies.

In the early 1980s, Skocpol publicly alleged that Harvard University had denied her tenure (1980) because she was a woman. This charge was found to be justified by an internal review committee in 1981. In 1984, Harvard University offered Skocpol a tenured position (its first ever for a female sociologist), which she accepted.

From 1986 to the present, Skocpol has held various positions at Harvard University including: Professor of Sociology; Director for the Center for American Political Studies; Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; and the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology.