The Tower Center for Political Studies at SMU maintains an office in the Centennial Center allowing us to link research activities of Tower Center faculty, fellows, and associates in Dallas (the heartland) with scholars, institutes, and think tanks in Washington and around the world. The Tower Center supports research and teaching in three areas: (1) international and comparative political economy, including trade, migration, and finance; (2) foreign policy, national security, and defense; and (3) American political development with an emphasis on policy, institutions, and process. Seyom Brown, Tower Chair in National Security and Director of Studies in the Tower Center, runs the national security program. Brown is conducting research for his two current book projects—an updated edition of The Faces of Power (Columbia University Press) and a new book entitled The Higher Realism (Paradigm Publishers), which advocates a shift in foreign policy after the 2008 election. Dennis Ippolito, McElvaney Professor of Political Science at SMU, leads the Tower Center program on American politics. His recent publications include Why Budgets Matter (Penn State) and he is working on a book entitled Welfare Shift, examining the past growth and projected future of federal social welfare programs and the federal budget.

Nominations for 2009 APSA Dissertation, Book, and Career Awards are now being accepted. Awards will be presented at the 2009 Annual Meeting in Toronto.

A Look at the Centennial Center for Political Science & Public Affairs

On February 13, 2008, a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing was broadcast on CNN, C-SPAN, and MSNBC. The attention of these networks was not surprising; they typically air congressional hearings and events. What was unusual was that viewers could also find the hearings on FOX, ABC, CBS, NBC, and ESPN. One of the hearing's key witnesses was Roger Clemens, a 24-year veteran of Major League Baseball who holds seven Cy Young awards. For more than four hours that day, Clemens was questioned by the committee regarding his alleged use of steroids (U. S. Congress 2008c).

Professor Isis Leslie is an interdisciplinary scholar who draws on film studies, history, and literature to examine questions of social justice. Some of her special interests include globalization, the intersections of racial politics and political theory, comparative political thought, human rights—their definition and abuses, and the relationships between psychoanalysis and politics.

The relationship between social science and policymaking, marked with “tension and ambiguity,” is one that scholars never ceased to be perplexed about (Anderson 2003). My research seeks to shed light on the interaction between the two by comparing how the “think tank model of expertise,” first developed in the U.S., is being emulated in the EU and in France where the political systems and the structures of social knowledge traditionally called for a different use of social science research. By looking at the comparative evolution of the think tank model I also wish to question the building of the expert as a modern figure that bridges a discursive regimen of “knowledge claim” used in the scientific world and a regimen of “truth-claim” consistent with political discourses (Veitl 2005; Leclerc 2001). Scrutinizing the activities of think tanks as a place where “experts” claim to inform and influence policymakers is, in that sense, a way to revisit and rethink the relations between power and knowledge (Ihl 2006).

During its 55-year history, the APSA Congressional Fellowship Program (CFP) has influenced much of the best work written about Congress. Top congressional and legislative scholars like David Mayhew, Alan Rosenthal, David Rohde, Lawrence Dodd, and Barbara Sinclair, to name just a few, were strongly influenced by their experience as legislative fellows on Capitol Hill. To cite the most prominent example, David Mayhew remarked that his fellowship year was integral to his writing of Congress: the Electoral Connection: “Absent my experience as an APSA Congressional Fellow in 1967–1968, there is not the slightest chance I would have conceived or written The Electoral Connection” (quoted in Biggs 2003, 143).

In an effort to increase graduate student participation in the Annual Meeting, the Association awarded 75 Advanced Graduate Student Travel Grants for the 2008 meeting in Boston. The names and institutional affiliations of the winners follow.

Here's a preview of some of the articles that will be published in the January 2009 issue of PS: Political Science and Politics:

Founded in 1953, the APSA Congressional Fellowship Program is the nation's oldest and most prestigious congressional fellowship. More than 50 years later, the program remains devoted to its original objective of expanding knowledge and awareness of Congress.

One manual for lobbyists in Congress warns those new to the trade that “winning the confidence of staff—and maintaining it thereafter—is a prerequisite to an ongoing, successful political relationship with any political office (Wolpe 1990).” The author then details the organization and loyalties among personal and committee staffs. One thing staffers have in common is that each specializes in an issue area and thus develops expertise over the issue, the players and politics of the committee, the legislative process, the interest groups, and the constituencies involved with the legislation (Wolpe 1990). Despite the wide-ranging literature on interest group activity in Congress, few distinctions are made between the efforts of lobbyists to influence staff, or ways in which the staff-interest group relationship varies in different types of offices.

APSA is pleased to announce a call for applications from U.S.-based APSA members interested in organizing a team of leaders for a three-week political science workshop, scheduled to take place in Accra, Ghana, in the summer of 2009. Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the 2009 Accra workshop is part of an ongoing three-year effort to organize annual residential political science workshops in Africa. The workshop will bring together up to 30 scholars and cover substantive issues, methodologies, and reviews of research. To learn about the 2009 workshop application process, visit: http://www.apsanet.org/~africaworkshops/content_56295.cfm. The deadline for applications is October 24.

Of the many vital functions that political parties serve in American democracy, selecting candidates for public office is near the top of the list. Giovanni Sartori (1976) cites this purpose as their chief defining element—claiming that, at a minimum, a party is a “political group that presents at elections, and is capable of placing through elections, candidates for public office” (64). Moreover, understanding how parties vet, groom, select, and promote candidates is central to empirically evaluating the strength of political party organizations, the quality of elected policymakers, and ultimately the effectiveness of government. For scholars of American politics, this has led to fruitful lines of research on the processes that the Democratic and Republican Parties use to select their candidates—namely the conventions, primaries, and caucuses that nominate individuals for various federal, state, and local offices. For example, many have investigated the effects of reforms to the presidential nomination process in the early 1970s (Aldrich 1993; Hagen and Mayer 2000; Reiter 1985; Wayne 2000), some arguing that it took power of choosing candidates away from the party organizations and towards other institutions like the press, interest groups, and small ideological factions (Polsby 1983) with potentially negative consequences for governance.

After five years of discussions and extensions, Congress has passed and the president has signed the first reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA) since 1998. Although most of the HEA deals with federal student aid, the legislation also includes many federal programs affecting colleges and universities, including support for international education and foreign language studies and graduate education. The new law also has a number of provisions reflecting some of the policy controversies affecting higher education.

In addition to awards conferred at the Association's Award Ceremony on Thursday, August 28, the following recognitions are being made at the business meetings and receptions of APSA's Organized Sections.

Global levels of inequality today are at extremely high levels even as conditions for alleviating deprivation are more favorable than ever before. Inequities in the international system and within developing countries threaten to halt progress toward greater democratization and economic development for the poorest countries in the world.