The Gladys M. Kammerer Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best book published during the previous calendar year in the field of U.S. national policy.
Douglas Arnold is the William Church Osborn Professor of Public Affairs, Emeritus, and Professor of Politics and Public Affairs, Emeritus, in Princeton University’s Department of Politics and in its School of Public and International Affairs. He has broad interests in American politics, with special interests in congressional politics, national policymaking, representation, accountability, and Social Security. The author of Congress and the Bureaucracy: A Theory of Influence (1979), The Logic of Congressional Action (1990), Congress, the Press, and Political Accountability (2004), and Fixing Social Security: The Politics of Reform in a Polarized Age (2022), he also co-authored Issues in Privatizing Social Security (1999) and co-edited Framing the Social Security Debate: Values, Politics, and Economics (1998).
After joining Princeton’s faculty in 1977, he taught a wide range of courses for undergraduate, MPA, MPP, and Ph.D. students. He has also chaired the Department of Politics for five years, and directed the School’s MPA and Ph.D. programs, and the Department’s Ph.D. program, for twelve years. He transferred to emeritus status in 2019, after 42 years of active service. He has been a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Guggenheim Fellow, a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, a recipient of grants from the Ford, Dirksen, Earhart, and National Science Foundations, and the recipient of the Richard F. Fenno prize in legislative studies. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Ph.D. Yale University (1977) .
Citation from the Award Committee:
In Fixing Social Security: The Politics of Reform in a Polarized Age, R. Douglas Arnold explores Congress’s inaction on impending Social Security insolvency over the past three decades. Arnold chronicles past reform episodes, describes the nature of the current challenge, illuminates the goals and incentives of relevant actors, and boldly lays out the potential routes to reform. With lucid prose and compelling logic, Arnold provides a masterclass of the application of theory to practical problem-solving. Fixing Social Security exemplifies the best of what political science has to offer to policy analysis – it is the rare book that offers as much to scholars as it does to practitioners, and we recommend it to all interested in the intersection of politics and policymaking.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Lesley Lavery (chair) of Macalester College, Dr. Devin Caughey of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Dr. Eduardo J. Gomez of Lehigh University.
