WASHINGTON — The National Capital Area Political Science Association awarded Jeff Biggs with the Walter Beach Pi Sigma Alpha Award this afternoon at the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) headquarters in Washington. Dr. Biggs served as director of the APSA Congressional Fellowship Program from 1997 to 2014.

The award recognizes Dr. Biggs’ “substantial contribution to strengthen the relationship between political science and public service,” NCAPSA president Matthew Green noted. The award is named after Walter Beach, a founding member of NCAPSA who also served as a director of the Congressional Fellowship Program and associate director of APSA.

“Jeff is a rare breed: someone who is a scholar, has worked in government service for many years, and spent nearly two decades bringing together hundreds of young scholars and policy-makers, contributing to the professional development of both,” Dr. Green said.

“I am very honored on behalf of the [APSA Congressional Fellowship Program],” Dr. Biggs said to those in attendance. “That honor is augmented by the many friends, colleagues, and former fellows who have preceded me in receiving this award and who played their own significant roles in the fellowship.”

Dr. Biggs also is an alumnus of the Congressional Fellowship Program. Established in 1953, the program enables select political scientists, journalists, federal employees, and other professionals to experience Congress at work by serving fellowship placements on congressional staffs. Before joining the APSA staff, Dr. Biggs spent twenty-one years in the Foreign Service and was named as a Foreign Affairs APSA Congressional Fellow in 1984, serving with Congressman Thomas Foley (D-WA) and Senator Alan Simpson (R-WY). He later served on then-Majority Leader and later-Speaker Foley’s senior staff as press secretary and spokesman from 1987 to 1994.

At today’s award ceremony, Dr. Green conveyed remarks from several CFP alumni who spoke of Dr. Biggs’ influence on their careers and his expertise on Congress.

“I would venture to say that no one single person affected my career more than Jeff Biggs, because he somehow turned an [American Political Development] presidential scholar into a Congress lover and watcher,” said Colleen Shogan, Deputy Director, Congressional Research Service and former president of NCAPSA.

Assistant director of the Congressional Research Service Government and Finance Division, John Haskell, said, “There are few people in Washington who know the ins and outs of Congress as well as Jeff, and there are fewer still who see Congress’ connections to the larger separated system in as sophisticated a way as he sees it.”

Dr. Biggs is a co-author with Thomas S. Foley of Honor in the House: Speaker Tom Foley, author of A Congress of Fellows: Fifty Years of the American Political Science Association Congressional Fellowship Program 1953-2003, and a number of journal articles.

Dr. Biggs retired from APSA in 2014.

APSA’s Kara Abramson contributed to this report.

We asked Beverly Scott her thoughts about receiving the Hubert H. Humphrey Award. Watch the video below to find out what she said.

You can also watch the video shown at the awards reception Wednesday night.

and see the photos from the event.

APSA 2015 in San Francisco

APSA 2015 in San Francisco

The Charles E. Merriam Award was established by the Association to recognize a person whose published work and career represent a significant contribution to the art of government through the application of social science research. First presented in 1975, the award was revived in 1995 and is presented biennially. This year, our winners are Douglas Rivers and Donna Shalala.

Secretary Donna E. Shalala is notable both as a dedicated public servant and as a scholar committed to advancing public service.

She began her contributions to public service in her formative scholarly writings about public finance.  Serving as secretary to the “Big MAC,” the Municipal Assistance Corporation that managed to pull New York City out of its budget crisis in the 1970s, Shalala was able to put her academic research into action.  After serving as Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1977-1980, she was appointed as President of Hunter College, City University of New York.  From there, she became Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, where she served until called in 1993 to become Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, a post she held throughout the Clinton Administration, until 2001.  At that point, she became president of the University of Miami, a post she held until recently; she currently heads the Clinton Foundation.

An unflagging supporter of expanding opportunities for everyone in society, Shalala has focused as a scholar on health and educational opportunities, on advancing equality for women, and on support for veterans. She made a federal response to AIDS a focus while at Health and Human Services.  And she remains a supporter of the public role of research in the social sciences to advance public causes. Like Charles Merriam, both as a scholar and public official, then, Donna Shalala has embodied the commitment to academic and public service that we honor with this Award.

Professor Douglas (Doug) Rivers is also honored by the award in recognition of the outstanding role he has played over the past thirty years as innovator and entrepreneur in pushing forward new strategies in survey methodology, field experimentation, data accessibility, research sustainability and empirical interpretation. He has innovated methods and data sources that are essential to the subsequent work of multiple generations of scholars in such fields as public opinion analysis, election studies and congressional politics, particularly through his roles in helping to create and expand Knowledge Networks (with Norman Nie) and Polimetrix,.

Additionally, as scholar, teacher, collaborator and reviewer, he has helped to clarify and demonstrate the ways in which new methods and data can address critical issues in the interpretation of data, and thus in the understanding of politics, that previous scholars lacking such methods and data were forced to ignore.

Charles Merriam was noted for his commitment to innovative political and social science scholarship, and for his consequent efforts in founding the Social Science Research Council to foster such research. As innovator, scholar, entrepreneur and teacher of the first order, Doug Rivers clearly follows in Merriam’s footsteps and is richly deserving of the Merriam Award.

Award Committee:
Pippa Norris, Harvard University
Larry Dodd, University of Florida
Joan Tronto, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

Recipients:
Doug Rivers, Stanford University
Donna Shalala, Clinton Foundation

Read more here.

The John Gaus Award and Lectureship honors the recipient’s lifetime of exemplary scholarship in the joint tradition of political science and public administration and, more generally, recognizes and encourages scholarship in public administration.

Paul C. Light is the recipient of the 2015 John Gaus Award and Lectureship, which honors a lifetime of exemplary scholarship in the joint tradition of political science and public administration. Light is currently the Paulette Goddard Chair of Public Service at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and founder of the Global Center for Public Service. His prior positions include vice president for governmental studies and Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, director of the Public Policy Program at the Pew Charitable Trusts, and associate dean at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of the University of Minnesota.

The letter nominating Light described his body of research as “focusing the disciplinary lens of political science on enduring questions of public administration.” Indeed, Light has an outstanding and prolific record of scholarship on government at the intersection of public administration, political science, and public policy, with research on bureaucracy, civil service, Congress, entitlement programs, the executive branch, government reform, nonprofit effectiveness, organizational change, and the political appointment process. He has authored 20 academic books, 4 books that translate issues for more general audiences, and scores of peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and research reports.

This research has earned frequent recognition from his peers. Light is a winner of three book awards, including the 2010 Herbert Simon award for A Government Ill Executed: The Decline of the Federal Service and How to Reverse It, and two Louis Brownlow Book Awards from the National Academy of Public Administration, for The Tides of Reform: Making Government Work, 1945–1994 and Thickening Government: Federal Hierarchy and the Diffusion of Accountability. His dissertation on the president’s agenda and domestic policy choice, which later appeared in print in three editions, won the E. E. Schattschneider Award from APSA.

In addition to his intellectual leadership in universities and research institutes, Light has also made important contributions to public service throughout his career. From his time as a staff member of the US Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, he has actively worked to communicate research to policymakers. He has given testimony before Congress on 27 separate occasions and has served on high-level national commissions, the National Commission on the American State and Local Public Service (Winter Commission), and the National Commission on the Public Service (Volcker Commission). Currently, he is a senior advisor for the Volcker Alliance, a senior fellow of the Governance Institute, and a fellow of the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Center for Excellence in Government. A fellow of the prestigious National Academy of Public Administration, Light was the 2007 Elmer Staats Lecturer for NAPA. He has also served on boards and task forces for the Association of Public Policy and Management and the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration.

The committee is pleased to honor Light’s many scholarly accomplishments and distinguished service with the 2015 John Gaus Award.

Award Committee:
Karen Mossberger, Arizona State University
Norma Riccucci, Rutgers University
Gene Brewer, University of Georgia

Recipient:
Paul Light, New York University

Read more here.

James C. Scott of Yale University is this years winner of The Benjamin E. Lippincott Award. This award was established by the Association to recognize a work of exceptional quality by a living political theorist that is still considered significant after a time span of at least 15 years since the original date of publication.

James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State is a magisterial work of exceptional quality. By compelling us to conceptualize state agency as predicated on creating a certain sort of “legible” knowledge about its subjects and environment, it has transformed our understanding of the nature of state authority and power. While the book has been highly influential across many areas of political science, and its author is at home in the wider discipline and in a number of related disciplines as well, we consider his voice in the central argument of this book (presented and honed originally in articles in prominent political theory publications) to have had an enduring significance for political theory in particular. Indeed this work demonstrates the value of political theory that is drawn out of meditation on exempla from a very wide range of contexts, comparative and historical. While the general form of the contrast between particular knowledge and oversimplifying generalizations, and the role of states in imposing those generalizations to the detriment of genuine social life, had been previously observed, Scott’s framing of the issue revealed how the very effort by states to produce knowledge of certain privileged kinds can also disable other crucial kinds of memory, insight, and political possibility. Seeing Like a State remains the indispensable source on the subject; we regard it as a classic work of political theory in our time.

Award Committee:
Melissa Lane, Princeton University
Bob Goodin, The Australian National University, Canberra
Robert Gooding-Williams, Columbia University

Recipient:
James C. Scott, Yale University. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1998)

Read more here