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State Politics
and Policy Section Newsletter Prepared by Thomas M. Carsey Panels and Events at the 2008 APSA The Section Business Meeting will be held during the APSA Annual Meeting on Thursday, August 28th, at 6:15 p.m. in the Sheraton Hotel, Room Beacon B.
Update from the Section President As we approach the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, the scientific study of state politics and policy continues to thrive. I am particularly impressed by the quantity and quality of the papers presented at the annual conference of the Section. It is a pleasure to attend the conference because one can attend all of the panels with pride and interest. The conference this year was hosted by Michael Hagen and company at Temple. Michael has a separate report on the conference in this newsletter. Let me simply say that the meeting was superb, including a strong program of quality papers and discussion, along with an opportunity to see the historic City Hall and carry on informal conversation. Next year’s meeting will be at the University of North Carolina and Duke University and is being organized by Tom Carsey, Virginia Gray, and Kerry Haynie. That will be followed by a conference in 2010 in Springfield organized by Chris Mooney. Look for more information, including dates of the conferences, elsewhere in this newsletter. Plans are underway as well for two conferences after that. Thanks to all the organizers and to the Conference Site Selection Committee of Andrew Karch (chair), Ron Weber, and Caroline Tolbert. Many of the papers from the annual conference end up in our best journals, including the Section’s own State Politics and Policy Quarterly. The journal continues to thrive under Dick Winters, David Lowery, and Ronald Weber. Recently the journal added another co-editor, Thad Kousser, who has distinguished himself by his scholarship on state politics, which has seen him win a Section prize two years running (see below). The Section has two big needs. One is to keep up our membership. As of the May membership count, we have 439 members. This earns us a tie for 22nd place among the thirty-six organized sections, one rank below the 2006 count. However, we are down some 100 members, perhaps because of the decision to raise membership dues and tie it to a subscription to our journal. It would be nice to move up one or two in the ranks, back to where we were several years ago. The second need is an administrative one that I will be working on in the coming months. Tom Carsey has been doing three jobs for five years—maintaining the Section web site, organizing the Section newsletter, and being secretary/treasurer. Now seems like a good time to split up these roles. We have already started this process by appointing a new webmaster (see below). But we will look to have separate individuals take on the newsletter and the job of secretary/treasurer. If anyone is interested in volunteering for the newsletter position, please let me know. Our thanks to Chris Bonneau for organizing the Section’s panels this year. I encourage you to attend these sessions, not only because of their obvious intellectual merit but also because panel allocations appear to be tied largely to panel attendance. Beth Reingold has agreed to represent the Section on next year’s APSA Program Committee and will be accepting proposals soon. Let’s plan to keep Beth busy as well and express appreciation to her for agreeing to contribute to the Section by taking on this task. We have appointed a new webmaster. Jonathan Winburn of the University of Mississippi has agreed to take on this task. He will begin shortly to redesign the home page. While we do not expect radical changes or a greatly extended web site, we do expect to have a more up-to-date look and to be able to up-date the contents more frequently. Please join me in welcoming Jon to this job. If you have suggestions for the web site, please let Jon know at jwinburn@olemiss.edu. Thanks to Tom Carsey for managing the web site for all these years. The Section Business Meeting will be held during the APSA Annual Meeting on Thursday, August 28th, at 6:15 p.m. in the Sheraton Hotel, Room Beacon B. A highlight of the Business Meeting will be giving out two best paper awards as well as the SPPQ award. This year’s selection committee consisted of Cynthia Bowling (chair), Robert Hogan, and Marjorie Sarbaugh-Thompson. As recipients of the Best Paper Award for the best paper on state politics and policy presented at the previous year’s APSA Annual Meeting, the committee chose Elizabeth Rigby (University of Houston) and Gerald Wright (Indiana University) for their paper “State Parties, Polarization, and Representation of the Poor.” For the Best Graduate Student Paper Award for the best paper on state politics and policy presented by a graduate student at the previous year’s APSA Annual Meeting, the committee selected Mike Binder (University of California, San Diego) for his paper “Confusion, Information and Voting Errors in Initiative Races.” Please join me in congratulating Elizabeth, Jerry, and Mike for their outstanding research, and also in thanking Cynthia, Robbie, and Marjorie for their excellent choices of winners. Also at the Business Meeting, the Section will be electing three new members of the Executive Council to replace the members whose terms are expiring. Nancy Martorano, Frederick Boehmke, Charles Shippan will be ending their service on the Executive Council and, while serving as the Nominating Committee, have nominated Donald Haider-Markel, Robert Lowry, and Susan Yackee as their replacements. Thanks to Nancy, Fred, and Chuck for their excellent help to me as the new president, and to Don, Bob, and Susan for their willingness to serve. These nominations will be subject to approval of the Section membership at the Business Meeting. I look forward to seeing you in Boston to recognize the excellent scholarship that characterizes the Section, not only by the award winners but also on the panels and in our informal conversations. Richard Niemi (niemi@rochester.edu) Section President (2007-2009) Paper Award Winners Announced This year’s selection committee consisted of Cynthia Bowling (chair), Robert Hogan, and Marjorie Sarbaugh-Thompson. As recipients of the Best Paper Award for the best paper on state politics and policy presented at the previous year’s APSA Annual Meeting, the committee chose Elizabeth Rigby (University of Houston) and Gerald Wright (Indiana University) for their paper “State Parties, Polarization, and Representation of the Poor.” For the Best Graduate Student Paper Award for the best paper on state politics and policy presented by a graduate student at the previous year’s APSA Annual Meeting, the committee selected Mike Binder (University of California, San Diego) for his paper “Confusion, Information and Voting Errors in Initiative Races.” SPPQ also gives an award for the best paper on state politics and policy presented at any professional meeting in the previous calendar year. The Award Committee for 2007 was Ben Highton (chair), Barbara Norrander, Ronald Hedlund, and the editors of SPPQ: Recipients of the SPPQ award for the best paper on state politics and policy presented at any professional meeting in the previous calendar year: Gerald Gamm (University of Rochester) and Thad Kousser (University of California, San Diego), "Diversity and the Breakdown of Deference." Update from SPPQ Editors Don Haider-Markel's term as Associate Editor of SPPQ responsible for The Practical Researcher section of the Quarterly comes to an end this June 30. Don has done a first-rate job, and Ron and Dave and I, along with Chris Mooney extend our thanks and appreciation to him for his service to the Quarterly and to the section members. We can more formally thank him at the section meeting in Boston at the September APSA section meeting. Chris Mooney and the three of us solicited applications for the next Practical Researcher editorship. This selection committee has asked Nancy Martorano of the University of Dayton to assume the position for the next four years. Nancy wrote an absolutely first-rate letter of application, and we believe that the agenda that she sets out will advance the PR part of the Quarterly in important new ways. As many of you know, Dave Lowery had to scale back his activities for personal family reasons. An advantage of having three editors is that Ron and I can "up" our activities in a partial response. However, all three of us agree that a "team of editors" is better than a "tandem of editors," so "incrementalists" that we are, we ask: why not ask another energetic, thoughtful, accomplished (and younger) editor to join us in a "Gang of Four." We consulted Chris on this issue, as well, and we all strongly supported the idea of adding Thad Kousser of the University of California at San Diego to the editorial team. His service will continue for the rest of our term. He has quite agreeably consented to join us. We welcome him to the "Gang." We extend out thanks to Michael Hagen and his colleagues at the Institute for Public Affairs and Temple University for hosting the 8th Annual SPP Conference. It was an outstanding conference with excellent papers and first rate discussion. Mark your calendars for the 2009 Conference at UNC/Duke on May 22-23, 2008. The SPPQ Best Paper Award Committee continues to solicit nominations. Barbara Norrander is chair of the committee; so please send your nominations for "best paper presented at a 2008 meeting or conference" to norrande@email.arizona.edu. A reminder that the editors of SPPQ, along with special editors Paul Djupe and Laura Olson, are soliciting manuscripts for a symposium issue on "religion and politics in the American states." The deadline date for submitting manuscripts is September 15th. And, now that we are midway through the MPSA/SPP Conference/APSA string of meetings, please consider how you are going to handle your about-to-be-finished manuscripts. Please consider SPPQ as #1 on your list! Best regards, Dave, Ron, Dick, and Thad Report on the 2008 Annual Conference Temple University hosted the eighth annual State Politics and Policy Conference in Philadelphia May 30 and 31. The Conference was sponsored by Temple’s Institute for Public Affairs, Temple’s Department of Political Science, and State Politics and Policy Quarterly. The conference also received support from Cengage Learning and Temple University Press. Our annual conference continues to grow. More than 150 political scientists from more than 80 institutions nationwide attended the 2008 event and participated in 21 panels and a poster session, organized around the theme “Elections and Representative Democracy in the States.” The papers and presentations covered a wide range of topics but were uniformly high in quality. Thanks to Tom Carsey, the conference papers are available at http://www.unc.edu/depts/polisci/statepol/conferences/2008/2008papers.htm. The conference sessions took place at Temple’s Center City campus, at the intersection of Broad and Market Streets, and out-of-towners stayed at the Doubletree Hotel a few blocks away. The program featured a cheesesteak lunch in Philadelphia’s City Hall (including an impromptu lecture by a tour guide on the building’s history) and dinner on Temple’s Main Campus. Rumor has it that some conference attendees sampled other Philadelphia establishments. My thanks to all who attended, to my Temple colleagues who served as chairs and discussants on panels, and to IPA staff members Nia Ramseur and Charlene Wiltshire, without whose help the conference would have been impossible. We are pleased and confident about passing the torch to Duke and North Carolina. See you in Chapel Hill! Michael Hagen State Politics Conference 2009, Call for Papers States in Transition: Politics and Policy in the post-Bush Era Hosted by the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill and Duke University Tom Carsey, UNC* Virginia Gray, UNC Kerry L. Haynie, Duke Our theme, “States in Transition: Politics and Policy in the Post-Bush Era” will bring together a broad range of scholars doing research in all areas of state politics and policy. We invite scholars to consider how states have evolved and adapted in the 21st century with an eye toward what may lay ahead. The Bush presidency began with an unprecedented struggle in Florida. Events like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the Iraq War, and policy debates in the areas of health care, the environment, immigration, and the No Child Left Behind Act have forced states to adapt to new local and national political realities. Finally, the 2008 Presidential context will be fought out in the states. Because all aspects of state politics and policy have been affected by these events, we feel our theme is broadly inclusive. The tentative due date for paper proposals is Friday, January 16th, 2009. Our budget should permit us to provide stipends for about 50-60 papers as well as panel discussants. We plan a series of traditional panels, a graduate student poster session, and maybe a special topics roundtable or two. We also plan to give an award to the best graduate student poster presented at the conference. The conference will be headquartered in Chapel Hill at the Courtyard Marriott Hotel and William and Ida Friday Center. We plan to have at least one special event on the main UNC campus, and dinner Friday night will be held at Duke. Both universities and the triangle area in general offer an exciting range of activities and sights to see. Attractions located on UNC’s beautiful campus include the Morehead Planetarium, the North Carolina Botanical Garden, Coker Arboretum, and the Ackland Art Museum. Duke’s campus is highlighted by Duke Chapel, the Nasher Museum of Art, and the breath-taking Duke Gardens. Attractions in the area include the Durham Bulls minor league baseball team, Durham’s American Tobacco Historic District, the UNC and Duke golf courses, the state capital in nearby Raleigh, and numerous historic sites, state parks, museums, lakes, and other attractions. The entire area is served by the Raleigh/Durham International (RDU) airport, which offers a wide range of options for those traveling to the area. * Carsey is the primary contact person, and is best reached by e-mail at: carsey@unc.edu State Politics Conference 2010 Where else better to celebrate the 10th anniversary of State Politics and Policy Quarterly and the Annual State Politics and Policy Conferences than Springfield, IL? Join us June 3-5, 2010, at the University of Illinois at Springfield for the 10th annual SPPC. In addition to the usual stellar panels of academic papers on state politics and policy, anticipate special panels and speakers on the conference's theme, "Political Scientists Meet Political Practitioners in the States-'How Can We Help You?'" Special events will include an opening reception and practitioner panel at the Old State Capitol (site of Abraham Lincoln's "House Divided" speech and Barack Obama's 2007 official campaign announcement) and dinner and keynote speech at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum (did I mention that Springfield was Abraham Lincoln's home town?). Mark your calendars! Chris Mooney |
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