Saluting our fifty-year members.

Upcoming International Events: 2006

“What do you do when the Supreme Court is wrong?” That question formed the title of a 1979 article in the Public Interest by the late Senator (and political scientist) Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and it resonates today across the political spectrum, as serious criticism of Supreme Court decisions can be found on both Left and Right. Of course if the Supreme Court has supreme authority over the meaning of the Constitution, then either it is incoherent to say the judges can be wrong or there is nothing anyone can do if they are. But everyone admits that erroneous constitutional decisions can evoke constitutional amendments. The question is, what can be done short of that?

For the past 18 months, APSA has been working with the Academic Fellowship Program (AFP) of the Open Society Institute (OSI) (www.soros.org/initiatives/hesp/focus/afp) to support their programs in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, and establish new linkages with political scientists and departments in the region. OSI recently held a conference bringing together 90 scholars from over 25 university departments from across the region. APSA members Benjamin Read (University of Iowa) and Susan L. Woodward (The Graduate Center, CUNY) were invited participants. Woodward has served as an AFP Non-Resident International Scholar, working with the faculty of political science at Belgrade University. Read was invited by AFP to discuss field research methods.

This article provides information about the Academic Fellowship Program, as well as an overview of the conference proceedings.

For more information about this conference and the APSA-OSI/AFP relationship, contact Bahram Rajaee at the APSA National Office (brajaee@apsanet.org).

Nominations for 2007 APSA Dissertation, Book, and Career Awards are now being accepted.

Committees of the American Political Science Association.

The 2005 recipients of the Rowman & Littlefield Award for Innovative Teaching in Political Science are Barbara Allen and Greg Marfleet of Carleton College.

The Northeastern Political Science Association (NPSA) held its annual meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in November 2005.

This list celebrates the generous contributions of our members in giving to one or more of the following programs from 1996 through 2005: APSA awards, programs, the Congressional Fellowship Program, and the Centennial Campaign. APSA thanks these donors for ensuring that the benefits of membership and the influence of the profession will extend far into the future. In future years, APSA will update and print this list annually in the January issue of PS.

Pi Sigma Alpha, the National Political Science Honor Society, is proud to announce the winners of its 2005 Chapter Activity Grants Competition. Now in its 24th year, the Chapter Activity Grants program is the biggest and most important of the honor society's roster of awards because of the size of its budget and the large number of students it affects. In this annual program Pi Sigma Alpha chapters submit proposals for activities they would not be able to carry out without funding. The maximum grant to any chapter is $2,000. The proposed activities may be in areas such as chapter and student development, social service, and the like. A grants committee reviews the proposals competitively and makes awards based on the quality and feasibility of the activity proposed, the completeness and appropriateness of the budget, and other factors. Some proposals receive full funding, some receive partial funding with instructions on how to scale back the activity, and some are rejected. This year the committee funded 88 chapter projects for a total of nearly $56,000.

The 102nd APSA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia refocused the discipline's take on the true crux of politics: power. Program Co-Chairs Judith Goldstein of Stanford University and Rick Valelly of Swarthmore College worked closely with plenary speakers, theme panel participants, and with a 51-person Program Committee drawn from all of APSA's 35 organized sections to realize their central vision: a revival of the discipline's examination of how power is used (and abused) in politics.

Designed to introduce 20 students to the world of graduate study and encourage applications to Ph.D. programs in political science, the heart of the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute (RBSI) is two transferable credit courses, one in quantitative analysis and one in race and American politics. The courses introduce students to the intellectual demands of graduate school and political science research methods. As a final project for both courses, students prepare original, empirical research papers and top students are given the opportunity to present their research at APSA's Annual Meeting, with all expenses paid by the Association. Exact dates for the 2006 Summer Institute will be announced in spring 2006.

For more than three decades, John Garcia has shaped American higher education and political science as a scholar, teacher, and leader. He provides guidance to fellow Latinos/as in the profession and inspiration to the next generation of scholars and students.

The American Political Science Association honored 19 scholars for their career achievements and outstanding research at the Awards Ceremony in Philadelphia. Hosted by 2006 Program Co-Chairs Rick Valelly and Judith Goldstein, the event began with a luncheon for the winners, their guests, and award committee members, and was followed by a ceremony presenting 19 prizes. Complete citations can be found in the Gazette section of this issue of PS (starting on page 1001).

Two Ralph Bunche Summer Institute Scholars, Candis Watts, Duke University, and DeReal R. Moore, Texas Christian University, presented research funded in part by the Jewel L. Prestage and Richard F. Fenno, Jr. Endowment for Minority Opportunities. The Prestage-Fenno Fund promotes and supports expanded opportunities for minority students contemplating advanced training in political science through such programs as, though not limited to, the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute.

Robert Alexrod, the Arthur W. Bromage Distinguished University Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He has appointments in the Department of Political Science and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, became the Association's 103rd president on September 2nd at the Association's Annual Business Meeting when outgoing APSA President Ira Katznelson of Columbia University presented Axelrod with the Association gavel. Joining Axelrod in guiding the Association are six new officers. Eight new members of the council will be elected in an all-member electronic election during the month of October. Details on the results of the election will be available on the web and in the January issue of PS.

By the mid 1990s, scholars, practitioners, and policy makers alike had begun to recognize the critical importance of good governance for growth and poverty reduction. Yet corruption, its mirror image, remained “taboo” at the World Bank up until the historic “cancer of corruption” speech in 1996 of then-Bank President James Wolfensohn that formally brought governance and anticorruption into the forefront of the Bank's agenda (see Figure 1). In 1997, the World Development Report: The State in a Changing World broke new ground within the Bank, taking stock of the erstwhile work on governance and addressing what the institution could do to enhance its ability to help client countries improve governance and reduce corruption.The presentation was made at the APSA 2005 meeting, “Panel on Politics and Development Programs: APSA and World Bank Collaboration.” Panel participants included: Margaret Levi (APSA President 2004–2005), Ashutosh Varshney, Anna Grzymala-Busse (University of Michigan at Ann Arbor), Daniel N. Posner (University of California Los Angeles), and Timothy Frye (Ohio State University) from APSA; and Sanjay Pradhan, Edgardo Campos, Richard Messick, and Maks Kobonbaev from the World Bank Public Sector Governance Unit.

This article helps fill the void in U.S. political science's approach to Latin American political science and its institutionalization. One example of that void is that PS: Political Science & Politics has recently published several pieces on the state of the discipline in diverse regions of the world but, despite its relative importance, none on the state of the discipline in Latin America (see, for example, Bogaç and Turan 2004; Rizayev 2004; and Sharapova 2005). This omission is remarkable because this continent has both nourished U.S. political science by providing several outstanding colleagues, many of whom have generated controversial and important arguments against the dominant paradigms in the discipline, and because, for better or worse, Latin America has been considered the “backyard” of the United States. Arguably, because of its economic, social, and political ties with the U.S., any major change in Latin America would have greater and more immediate implications for the U.S. than similar events elsewhere in the world. These topics are particularly pertinent with the upcoming conference of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) being held in Santiago, Chile, in 2009, and the APSA's new efforts to recruit members from overseas, especially from not-so privileged countries.

In an effort to increase graduate student participation in the Annual Meeting, the Association awarded 53 Advanced Graduate Student Travel Grants for the 2006 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. The names and institutional affiliations of the 2006 winners follow.

Upcoming international events 2006.

Ten outstanding students from the 2006 Ralph Bunche Summer Institute (RBSI) presented their research at the American Politics II and Teaching and Learning Poster Session at this year's Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. RBSI is hosted by Duke University and is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. The program is directed by Paula McClain, professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Social Sciences, at Duke University. The students were accompanied to this year's meeting by Professor Maurice Woodard, Howard University, and former director of minority affairs at APSA. This year's class of RBSI students who presented at this year's Annual Meeting: