The John Gaus Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor a lifetime of exemplary scholarship in the joint tradition of political science and public administration. Carpenter will deliver the Gaus Lecture on Friday, September 1, 2023 at 6:30pm PDT as part of the APSA Annual Meeting.
Daniel Carpenter is Allie S. Freed Professor of Government and Chair of the Department of Government in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1989 with distinction in Honors Government and received his doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago in 1996. He taught previously at Princeton University (1995-1998) and the University of Michigan (1998-2002). He joined the Harvard University faculty in 2002. In July 2021, he served as Faculty Director of the Social Sciences at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, a position he also held from 2013 to 2020.
Professor Carpenter’s research and writing has received numerous awards. His research on petitioning appears in his book Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790-1870 (Harvard University Press, 2021), which was awarded the J. David Greenstone Prize of the American Political Science Association, the Seymour Martin Lipset Prize of the American Political Science Association and the James P. Hanlan Book Award of the New England Historical Association.
He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Radcliffe Institute Fellow (2007-2008), and Fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2003-2004), as well as an elected fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Studies in American Political Development, Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Lancet, and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, among other venues. His public writings have appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde, the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Washington Monthly and other outlets.
Citation from the Award Committee:
Professor Carpenter’s scholarship on public bureaucracy and regulations has made substantial contributions to the joint tradition of political science and public administration. He has published in top outlets and amassed more than 11,700 citations on Google Scholar. Theoretically, his work extends beyond the political science and institutional politics understanding of bureaucracy to incorporate context and development of administrative reputations to explain agency operations and performance. His body of work is known for creatively engaging numerous methods from historical archival work to advance statistical modeling. His scholarship has become foundational readings for students in political science and public administration. As a testament to his contributions, his nominators state “Professor Carpenter is the most important scholar of his generation in the study of public administration, and the most important figure in the field during the past quarter century.”
Professor Carpenter’s work has been recognized with numerous awards including The Allan Sharlin Memorial Award of the Social Science History Association for his book Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA (Princeton, 2010) and both the Gladys Kammerer Prize of the American Political Science Association and the Charles Levine Prize of the International Political Science Association for The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862-1928. His career accomplishments have been recognized with the The Herbert A. Simon Award for Career Scholarly Contributions to the Scientific Study of Bureaucracy (2011, Midwest Political Science Association) and by being an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Carla M. Flink (chair) of American University, Dr. John Brehm of the University of Chicago, and Dr. Daniel E. Chand of Kent State University.
