SPOTLIGHT: Axelrod Awarded Skytte Prize

Robert Axelrod at Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan, is the winner of the 2013 Johan Skytte Prize in political science. He is awarded the prize for “profoundly having changed our presumptions about the preconditions for human cooperation.” The Johan Skytte Prize is one of the most prestigious prizes in political science.

The Johan Skytte Prize is awarded for the 19th year by the Johan Skytte Foundation at Uppsala University in a ceremony taking place in Uppsala on September 28, 2013.

Robert Axelrod's most cited and famous book The Evolution of Cooperation was published in 1984, preceded by a prize-winning article in Science 1981 co-authored together with biologist William D. Hamilton. The fundamental question of under which conditions cooperation and not conflict could become a beneficial strategy when self-interest is the individually driving force is at the center of Robert Axelrod's works. He shows that for reciprocity to develop, durable and long-term relations of an infinite nature are determinant.

Robert Axelrod, a former APSA president, has opened new research frontiers through his work and contributed to form political science, economics, sociology, anthropology, biology, and computer science. His conclusions are decisive for improving our understanding of international relations, negotiations, complex organizations, and political decision-making bodies.

The Skytte Foundation at Uppsala University has established an annual prize, The Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, to the scholar who in the view of the Foundation has made the most valuable contribution to political science. Research in all areas of the discipline is considered: political theory, comparative politics, public administration and international relations. The prize consists of a medal and a cash award.

SPOTLIGHT: Garrett Named Fellow of the AAPSS

In recognition for her extensive work on direct democracy, tax reform, and statutory interpretation, University of Southern California (USC) Provost Elizabeth Garrett has been named a 2013 Harold Lasswell Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS).

Garrett officially joined the academy—one of the nation's oldest learned societies—at a ceremony on May 9 in Washington, DC.

“The USC community is tremendously proud that Provost Garrett has been elected to the American Academy of Political and Social Science,” said President C. L. Max Nikias. “This exceptional honor reflects Provost Garrett's numerous scholarly contributions as well as her long-standing dedication to improving public policy through rigorous research.”

Garrett's fellowship is named after Harold Lasswell, an interdisciplinary scholar and leading American political scientist and communications theorist.

“It is a great honor to be selected for membership in this academy and, in particular, to join others who hold this fellowship that honors the legacy of Harold Lasswell, a scholar who exemplifies the interdisciplinary approach that has revolutionized the study of law in research universities,” said Garrett, the Frances R. and John J. Duggan Professor of Law, Political Science and Public Policy.

“Beth Garrett is a leading expert on statutory interpretation, direct democracy, and the ways in which legislation shapes national budget and tax policy,” said Thomas Kecskemethy, executive director of the AAPSS. “Her scholarly career demonstrates how social science can advance the common good, and we're thrilled that she's joining the academy as a fellow.”

Garrett was also legal counsel to Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.) and a member of former President George W. Bush's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform. She also served on the California Fair Political Practices Commission.

SPOTLIGHT: Slaughter Named President of New America Foundation

The New America Foundation's Board of Directors announced the appointment of Anne-Marie Slaughter as the Foundation's next president, effective Sept. 1.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, a current APSA vice president, a Princeton University professor of political science, former Dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and the former Director of Policy Planning at the US State Department, will succeed Steve Coll, who stepped down on March 31 after five years leading the nonpartisan public policy think tank. Professor Slaughter, a current New America board member, will work out of both New America's Washington, DC, and New York offices.

“Anne-Marie Slaughter is a creative, inspiring thinker who has played a critical role in the institution's success as a board member, and we are thrilled for her to lead New America in what promises to be an exceptional period for both the institution and society,” said David Bradley, chairman of the Board's search committee. “Steve Coll firmly established New America as an innovative policy institute that's tackling today's greatest challenges, and she is the right person to build on that foundation.”

“I have loved New America ever since I met its founder Ted Halstead over a decade ago,” Slaughter said. “It is a generator and incubator of big ideas, assembling a community of thinkers and policy entrepreneurs who have the time to look over the political horizon in a way that is rare in Washington. On the personal front, leaving the academy for New America will be a new and exciting adventure, allowing me to combine my foreign policy and social policy interests, help build a genuinely 21st century think tank, and combine career and family in a way that works for both.”

Slaughter served as Director of Policy Planning at the US Department of State from 2009 to 2011. She was the first woman to hold that position. She is currently the Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, where she also served as Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs prior to her government service. With her new role at New America, she will transition to emeritus status at Princeton.

Dr. Slaughter is one of the nation's leading thinkers about the challenges and opportunities presented by 21st century globalization. Foreign Policy magazine has named Slaughter to its annual list of the Top 100 Global Thinkers in each of the past four years. She has written or edited six books, including A New World Order (2004) and The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World (2007).

The New America Foundation is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute that invests in new thinkers and new ideas to address the next generation of challenges facing the United States. New America emphasizes work that is responsive to the changing conditions and problems of our 21st century.

Lieberman Named 14th Provost of Johns Hopkins

Robert C. Lieberman, a political scientist and academic administrator at Columbia University, has been named the 14th provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at The Johns Hopkins University.

Lieberman, now interim dean of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs and professor of political science and public affairs, was appointed by the executive committee of the university's board of trustees on the recommendation of President Ronald J. Daniels.

“Rob brings a scholarly record and leadership experience, clearly marked with the ‘excellence gene,’ that will make him a wonderful partner for me and the university's senior leadership team as we work to advance our mission,” Daniels said.

As provost, Lieberman will be the university's chief academic officer. He will be responsible for working with the deans of Johns Hopkins' nine academic divisions and will have oversight for research at a university that for decades has received more federal research and development dollars than any other.

“Johns Hopkins has been at the cutting edge of American higher education for more than 135 years, generating knowledge and applying ingenuity to the biggest questions we face as an increasingly global society,” Lieberman said. “I'm excited by the challenge of helping a great university determine how and where it will make its next contributions.”

Lieberman will join Johns Hopkins on July 1.

American Academy of Arts and Sciences Elects New Members

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences today announced the election of 198 new members. They include some of the world's most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists, and civic, corporate, and philanthropic leaders.

One of the nation's most prestigious honorary societies, the Academy is also a leading center for independent policy research. Members contribute to Academy publications and studies of science and technology policy, energy and global security, social policy and American institutions, and the humanities, arts, and education.

“Election to the Academy honors individual accomplishment and calls upon members to serve the public good,” said Academy President Leslie C. Berlowitz. “We look forward to drawing on the knowledge and expertise of these distinguished men and women to advance solutions to the pressing policy challenges of the day.”

Seven new members in the political science, international relations, and public policy were named:

Daniel Andreas Diermeier, Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management

John D. Huber,Columbia University

Simon David Jackman,Stanford University

Stephen Joseph Macedo,Princeton University

Rose M. McDermott,Brown University

Alastair Smith,New York University

Leonard Wantchekon,Princeton University

The new class will be inducted at a ceremony on October 12, 2013, at the Academy's headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Since its founding in 1780, the Academy has elected leading “thinkers and doers” from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth. The current membership includes more than 250 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.

PROSE Award to Schlozman, Verba, and Brady

Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry E. Brady's The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2012) is the recent winner of the 2012 PROSE Award, presented by the Association of American Publishers, in the categories of government and politics and in social sciences. The book has been appropriately recognized as the most comprehensive and systematic examination of political voice in America ever undertaken—and its findings are sobering.

The Unheavenly Chorus is the first book to look at the political participation of individual citizens alongside the political advocacy of thousands of organized interests—membership associations such as unions, professional associations, trade associations, and citizens groups, as well as organizations like corporations, hospitals, and universities. Drawing on various in-depth surveys and representing thirty-five thousand organizations over a 25-year period, the authors conclusively demonstrate that American democracy is marred by deeply ingrained and persistent class-based political inequality. This book convincingly reveals how far Americans are from the democratic ideal and how difficult it would be to attain it. For more information, visit www.proseaward.com.

Guggenheim Fellowships Awarded

In its 89th annual competition for the United States and Canada, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded fellowships to a diverse group of 175 scholars, artists, and scientists. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants. In political science, two individuals were selected.

John R. Hibbing is the Foundation Regents University Professor of Political Science (with a courtesy appointment in Psychology) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he has taught since 1981. He has been a NATO Fellow in Science, a Senior Fulbright Fellow, recipient of the Fenno Prize, principal investigator for nine National Science Foundation grants, and was recently elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

For the first two decades of his career, he studied legislatures, elections, and public opinion, authoring or co-authoring books such as Congressional Careers (UNC Press 1991), Congress as Public Enemy (Cambridge, 1995), and Stealth Democracy (Cambridge, 2002). Since then, his interests have shifted to the role of biology in explaining individual-level political variation. Some of this variation entails different ideological beliefs and leads to the question of whether liberals and conservatives have distinct biological characteristics and tendencies. The somewhat surprising answer is that they do.

The project for which he will be using the Guggenheim Fellowship, however, deals with variation not in political ideology but in political participation. Preliminary indications are that chronic non-voters tend to have high levels of cortisol, a hormone commonly associated with stress, a reasonable finding given that politics, particularly as it is practiced in the United States, tends to be stressful. Further understanding of the situations under which high stress levels discourage political participation and turnout could make it possible to derive strategies that will be more effective at encouraging high-cortisol individuals to enter the political arena, thus strengthening democracy and inclusiveness.

Scott E. Page is the Leonid Hurwicz Collegiate Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics at the University of Michigan and an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute. Scott has previously taught at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Iowa.

Scott's research over the past decade has focused on the roles that diversity plays in complex social systems. He has written three books The Difference, Complex Adaptive Social Systems, and Diversity and Complexity. All three explore this interplay between diversity and complexity. He relies on mathematical and computational models to explore how diversity comes to be, how it is maintained, and how it contributes functional properties such as robustness and innovativeness to systems. His research combines insights and techniques from a variety of disciplines, including economics, political science, physics, biology, ecology, and computer science.

Scott has received numerous awards, grants, and honors for his research and teaching including being elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has also been an early participant in teaching online courses—his Model Thinking class has attracted nearly 200,000 students.

He will be using his Guggenheim Fellowship to connect his current research on diversity within complex systems with the literature in which he was formally trained, namely that of equilibrium analysis of institutions and mechanism design. He will explore how institutions—through incentive and informational structures—encourage and constrain various types of diversity and whether they produce the right kinds and levels of diversity. This exploration will require a deep intellectual dive into how a complexity frame of institutions differs from an equilibrium frame. The project will involve collaborations with political scientists, mathematical economists, sociologists, and social psychologists.

Often characterized as “midcareer” awards, Guggenheim Fellowships are intended for men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. For more information about the awards, visit www.gf.org.

Fellows Elected at AAAS

The election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement Science (AAAS) is an honor bestowed upon members by their peers. Fellows are recognized for meritorious efforts to advance science or its applications.

The 701 association members elected by the AAAS Council were recognized for their contributions to science and technology in February at the 2013 AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston. In the Section on Social, Economic and Political Sciences, the following individuals were named Fellows:

Howard E. Aldrich,University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Nicole Woolsey Biggart,University of California, Davis

Herbert Gintis,Central European University, Hungary

Randy Hodson,Ohio State University

Edward Paul Lazear,Stanford University

Deirdre McCloskey,University of Illinois at Chicago

Melvin L. Oliver,University of California, Santa Barbara

Zhenchao Qian,Ohio State University

Alvin E. Roth,Harvard University

John Skvoretz,University of South Florida

Richard Michael Suzman,National Institute on Aging/NIH

For more details about AAAS Fellows, the nomination process, or AAAS, visit www.aaas.org/aboutaaas.

PS Notes…

Frank H. Mackaman, The Dirksen Congressional Center, has been elected to a two-year term as president of the Association of Centers for the Study of Congress (ASCS). The ACSC was founded in 2003 as an independent alliance of more than 50 organizations and institutions that promote the study of the US Congress.

In addition to The Dirksen Center, members include the Senate Historical Office, the House Office of History and Preservation, the Center for Legislative Archives at the National Archives and Records Administration, the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the US Senate, and the Robert Dole Institute of Politics.

Thom Brooks has joined Durham Law School as reader in law and associate in philosophy. He was formerly reader in political and legal philosophy in the department of politics at Newcastle University. Brooks is founding editor of the Journal of Moral Philosophy.

Harvey Starr, the Dag Hammarskjold Professor in International Affairs at the University of South Carolina, assumed the presidency of the International Studies Association at the ISA's Annual Meeting in San Francisco on April 4, 2013. A recent vice-president of ISA, Professor Starr has also been president of the APSA's Conflict Processes Section, and APSA vice-president (1995–96).

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