Bo Rothstein holds the August Röhss Chair in Political Science at University of Gothenburg in Sweden where he is co-founder and head of the Quality of Government (QoG) Institute which was started in 2004. Rothstein took his PhD at Lund University in 1986 and served assistant/associate professor at the Department of Government at Uppsala University 1986 to 1995. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, Collegium Budapest for Advanced Study, Harvard University, University of Washington-Seattle, Cornell University, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, the Australian National University and Stanford University. He has served as adjunct professor at University of Bergen and University of Aalborg. His most recent books are The Quality of Government: Corruption, Inequality and Social Trust in International Perspective (University of Chicago Press 2011, also published in Chinese in 2012 by Xinhua Publishers) and the co-edited volume Good Government: The Relevance of Political Science (Edward Elgar 2012). Among his other books in English are Just Institutions Matter: The Moral and Political Logic of the Universal Welfare State and Social Traps and the Problem of Trust (both published by Cambridge University Press). He has published in journals such as World Politics, World Development, Comparative Politics, Governance, Comparative Political Studies and Politics & Society. Since 2012 he is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 2003, he was awarded a Leading Scholars grant by the Swedish Science Council and in 2013 he received an Advanced Research Grant from the European Research Council. He is a regular contributor to the public debate in Sweden and (to a minor extent) internationally on issues such as social justice, social policy, anti-corruption and human well-being.
Statement of views: I have since long been engaged in discussions about the ethics, professional standards and relevance of the political science discipline. Among my publications in this field are “Is Political Science Producing Technically Competent Barbarians?” in European Political Science (2005) and “Human Well-being and the Unsung Relevance of Political Science”, in Gerry Stoker et. al. (eds.) The Relevance of Political Science (Palgrave 2015). If elected, I would seek to: 1) address the issues about the relevance and ethics of political science teaching and research; 2) start a discussion about the organization of the Annual Meeting in order to increase the quality of the panels; 3) promote efforts by the association for increasing collaboration and exchange across the sub-fields in the discipline.
The APSA Nominating Committee met on February 13, 2015, and nominated the slate of officers and council members to serve beginning in fall 2015. The call for nominations was circulated widely among the membership with outreach to APSA committees and organized sections. The nominating committee made its decisions after careful deliberation and due consideration for the diversity of the field and the varied interests of political scientists. There were no additional nominees from the members, and council members and officers were approved in October 2015 by the APSA Council, under its power to fill interim vacancies (APSA Constitution, Article V). APSA welcomes the new council members and other officers to APSA leadership.