Political Science

Full-Time Faculty

2007-2008

DENNIS S. IPPOLITO, CHAIR
CHELSEA BROWN
SEYOM BROWN
BRADLEY K. CARTER
JAMES F. HOLLIFIELD
VALERIE HUNT
CALVIN C. JILLSON
JOSEPH F. KOBYLKA
MICHAEL LUSZTIG
LUIGI MANZETTI
TAKAYUKI SAKAMOTO
DENNIS SIMON
J. MARK SKORICK
HAROLD W. STANLEY
WENDY WATSON
STEPHEN K. WEGREN
J. MATTHEW WILSON

BRADLEY KENT CARTER received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1972. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and has been at SMU since 1970. Carter has also taught in both the General Education and M.L.A. programs.

Carter's teaching and research interests include political thought, organization theory, American politics, and the historical study of institutional development. He has authored articles on James Madison and Mary Parker Follett.

Mr. Carter is the Chief Marshal of the University. He has served as President of the Faculty Senate. He has received the Willis M. Tate Award and has twice been selected as a Rotunda Outstanding Professor.

JAMES F. HOLLIFIELD received his doctorate in Political Science at Duke University in 1985. Currently he is Professor of International Political Economy, Director of the John G. Tower Center for Political Studies at SMU. In addition to SMU, he has held faculty appointments at Auburn, Brandeis, and Duke Universities. In 1992 he was Associate Director of Research at the CNRS and the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales of the FNSP in Paris. From 1986 to 1992 he was a Research Associate at Harvard University's Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies and co-chair of the French study group, and in 1991-92 he was an Associate at Harvard's Center for International Affairs. He has worked as a consultant for the U.S. Government, as well as several organizations, including the United Nations and the OECD.

Hollifield has been the recipient of grants from private foundations and government agencies, including the Social Science Research Council, the Sloan Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. He has written numerous articles and books, including Searching for the New France (Routledge, 1990) with George Ross, Immigrants, Markets and States (Harvard University Press, 1992), and Controlling Immigration (2nd edition, Stanford University Press, 2002) with Wayne Cornelius and Philip Martin. He just completed his fifth book, entitled Immigration et L'Etat-Nation (Immigration and the Nation-State), published by l'Harmattan, Paris. His most recent work looks at the rapidly evolving relationship between trade, migration, and the nation state. He is the co-editor (with Calvin Jillson ) of Pathways to Democracy, The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (Routledge, 1999) and of Migration Theory, Talking Across Disciplines (Routledge, 2000) with Caroline B. Bretell. His teaching interests lie primarily in the areas of international and comparative political economy.

VALERIE HUNT received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Washington in Spring 2002. She also holds B.A .and M.A. degrees in International Relations with a focus on Middle Eastern Affairs and defense studies.

Professor Hunt’s teaching and research interests are in American politics, public policy, and American national institutions. Specifically, she is interested in U.S. immigration policy and the politics of biotechnology research. Her current work investigates how relationships between national governing institutions shaped the U.S. immigration policy process from 1947 to 1998. She has found that competition between congressional committees over decision-making authority over immigration matters had an impact on the policy process along with changes in economic performance and partisan control. In the case of Court deference to congressional decision-making authority in matters of citizenship conferral, when the Court redefined the matter as one of constitutionality – an area where the Court has jurisdictional authority – the Court stepped into the policy arena.

A number of institutions and fellowship organizations have supported Professor Hunt’s research. She was a Fellow of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, a Research Fellow at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at University of California, San Diego and is a past Fellow of the International Migration Program of the Social Science Research Council. She has also received support from the National Science Foundation and the C. Everett Dirksen Research Foundation.

DENNIS S. IPPOLITO is the Eugene McElvaney Professor of Political Science and chairman of the Department of Political Science at SMU. Professor Ippolito received his Ph.D. in Government from the University of Virginia in 1967. Prior to joining the faculty at SMU, he taught at the University of Virginia and Emory University. He has also presented invited lectures at the U.S. Army War College since 1990.

Professor Ippolito’s research focuses on federal budget policy, fiscal policy, and national political institutions. His most recent books include Why Budgets Matter: Budget Policy and American Politics (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); Budget Policy and the Future of Defense (Institute for National Strategic Studies/National Defense University Press, 1994), and Uncertain Legacies: Federal Budget Policy from Roosevelt through Reagan (University Press of Virginia, 1990). Other books on budget policy have analyzed spending and deficit-control problems, federal credit programs and contingent liabilities, and constitutional restrictions on fiscal policy. His work has been supported by various private and public agencies, including the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the Twentieth Century Fund, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Professor Ippolito’s current research project, with Professor James F. Hollifield, deals with the impact of demographic trends on the public retirement and healthcare systems in the United States and other industrialized democracies.

CALVIN C. JILLSON received his B.S. in Political Science from Oregon State University in 1971 and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1976 and 1979. He taught at Louisiana State University (1980-87) and the University of Colorado (1987-95) before joining the faculty of Southern Methodist University in July 1995 as Professor and Chair in the Department of Political Science. Dr. Jillson was the Director of the John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Studies and chaired the department from 1996 to 2001.

Professor Jillson teaches and writes in the areas of American Political Thought and development of American Political Institutions. Several recent books, Congressional Dynamics (Stanford University Press, 1994), New Perspectives on American Politics (CQ Press, 1994) and The Dynamics of American Politics (Westview Press, 1994), deal with the origins of American legislatures and with the health and performance of contemporary American politics and political institutions. He is also the co-editor (with Jim Hollifield) of Pathways to Democracy, The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (Routledge, 1999). Professor Jillson's latest book is an American government text entitled American Government: Historical Change and Institutional Development (Harcourt-Brace, 1998). His current project, The American Dream: The Politics of Opportunity and Exclusion in American History, will appear from the University of Kansas Press in 2004.

Professor Jillson chaired the Department of Political Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder, from 1989 to 1993, and served as founding director of the Keller Center for the Study of the First Amendment from 1993 to 1995. Professor Jillson also served as Chair of the Department of Communication Disorders and Speech Sciences at the University of Colorado from 1993 to 1995 where he was charged with the complete reorganization of that department. He served as the President of the Southwest Political Science Association during 1992 and 1993 and currently serves on a number of regional and national committees, boards, and associations relating to teaching and research in political science.

JOSEPH F. KOBYLKA earned his B.A., with honors, in Government and History at Beloit College (1978) and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Minnesota (1984). Since joining the SMU faculty in 1983, he has published three books – The Politics of Obscenity (Greenwood, 1990), Public Interest Law: An Annotated Bibliography (Garland, 1992), and The Supreme Court and Legal Change: Abortion and the Death Penalty (University of North Carolina Press, 1992) – and several journal articles and book chapters (most recently, “Smoking in the Courtroom: Law, Tobacco, and the Litigation of Health Risks,” forthcoming in Ivers and McGuire, Creating Constitutional Change: People, Power and the Law, University of Virginia Press). His teaching interests touch on constitutional law and politics, judicial decision making, and American Political Thought. He is currently finishing a biography of former Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun and will then turn to a study of recent church-state litigation.

A recipient of four SMU research grants and fellowships, Kobylka has also won numerous teaching and service awards at SMU. These include: the Deschner Award (1984), Rotunda Outstanding Professor (1986, 1993, 1995, 2002), the Golden Mustang (1990), the Willis M. Tate Award (1991), Godbey Author’s Award (1992), and the SMU “M” Award. He was also named an inaugural recipient of the Altschuler Distinguished Teaching Award (2001) and is a member of SMU’s “Academy of Distinguished Teachers. He serves as faculty advisor to the Honor Council, the Political Science Symposium, and Pi Sigma Alpha.

MICHAEL LUSZTIG received his Ph.D. from McGill University in 1994. He is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Southern Methodist University. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Post-Doctoral Fellow at Florida State University.

Lusztig's work focuses on the politics of trade and on comparative constitutional politics. He has recently published Risking Free Trade: The Politics of Trade in Britain, Canada, Mexico and the United States (Pittsburgh University Press, 1996), and has just completed a second book entitled The Limits of Rent-Seeking: Policy Innovation and the Liberalization of Trade. Professor Lusztig is the co-editor (with Patrick James and Donald Abelson) of The Myth of the Sacred: The Charter and Judicial Politics in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002), and the author of several edited book chapters. In addition, he has published articles in journals such as The International Political Science Review, Comparative Politics, Publius, World Politics, Canadian Journal of Political Science, Nations and Nationalism and Review of International Political Economy.

LUIGI MANZETTI is Associate Professor of Political Science and has been the Director of Latin American Studies at Southern Methodist University between 2000-04 and 2006-07. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Iowa (1988) and has previously taught at Duke University and served as a research associate at the North South Center of the University of Miami between 1992 and 2002. He specializes in issues that include governance, corruption, and market reforms in Latin America. He is the author of The IMF and Economic Stabilization (Praeger, 1991), Political Forces in Argentina (with Peter G. Snow, Praeger, 1993), Institutions, Parties and Coalitions in Argentine Politics (Pittsburgh University Press, 1993), Privatization South American Style (Oxford University Press 1999), and the editor of Regulatory Policy in Latin America: Post-Privatization Realities (North-South Center Press at the University of Miami, 2000). His journal articles have appeared in World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, the Journal of Latin American Studies, and the Latin American Research Review. Mr. Manzetti has been a consultant for the U.S. Agency on International Development, the United States Information Agency, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He can be reached at lmanzett@smu.edu.

TAKAYUKI SAKAMOTO (Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1997) is Assistant Professor of Political Science. He joined the Department of Political Science in 2002. Previously, he was a visiting researcher at the Institute of Oriental Culture, the University of Tokyo, and at the Faculty of Policy Studies, Chuo University (Tokyo). He also taught as assistant professor at the Faculty of Policy Studies, Nanzan University in Japan, before coming to SMU. At SMU, he teaches courses on Japanese Politics, Introduction to Comparative Politics, East Asian Politics, and Comparative Political Economy of Industrialized Countries.

Sakamoto’s current research focuses on various aspects of the politics and political economy of Japan (e.g., policy making, legislative politics, political system, etc.), and on cross-national analyses of economic policy, economic performance, and political-economic institutions among OECD countries. He is the author of Building Policy Legitimacy in Japan: Political Behaviour beyond Rational Choice (Basingstoke: Macmillan/New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), and published articles in Comparative Political Studies, Party Politics, Japanese Studies, and Leviathan. He was a recipient of Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship to Japan, University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation Dissertation Fellowship, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Research Fellowship, and Japanese Ministry of Education Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research.

DENNIS M. SIMON (Ph.D., Michigan State University) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and a founding member of the John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Studies. His teaching and research interests include the American Presidency, presidential-congressional relations, public opinion, electoral behavior, and research methodology. His research has appeared in such leading journals as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics. He is the recipient of SMU’s 2001-2002 President's Associate Award for teaching and scholarship, the Pi Sigma Alpha award given by the Southern Political Science Association for his study of national forces in state legislative elections, and the Miriam Irish award given by the Southern Political Science Association for his study (with Barbara Palmer) of the emergence of women in U.S. electoral politics.

His current research agenda includes two projects. The first, entitled The Perilous Experiment, is an historical and quantitative study that traces the evolution of popular and legislative leadership in the American Presidency. His second project, “Southerners in the United States House of Representatives,” is a history of electoral and ideological change in the South since 1930 and is supported by a grant awarded by the Dirksen Congressional Center.

Within the University, he has served as a member of the Governing Board of the Tower Center, Chair of the SMU Athletic Council, and faculty representative to the SMU Board of Trustees Committee on Athletics. He regularly teaches in the summer programs for talented and gifted student sponsored by the Gifted Students Institute at SMU and, with Calvin C. Jillson, designed the Tower Institute, a scholarship program for gifted and talented students who wish to pursue the study of politics and policy. Outside of the University, he serves as a consultant to the Advanced Placement Program and regularly conducts teaching workshops for high school instructors throughout the state.

HAROLD W. STANLEY is the Geurin-Pettus Distinguished Chair in American Politics and Political Economy. He holds B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University in political science and a master of philosophy in politics from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. In 1979, he joined the University of Rochester Department of Political Science and served as its chair from 1996-1999.

Known as an expert in American national politics and electoral change in the South, Stanley's current research concerns presidential nominations, partisan change and voting rights. He is past president of the Southern Political Science Organization. His publications include Vital Statistics on American Politics, 2001-2002 (with Richard G. Niemi) and Voter Mobilization and the Politics of Race. He has published articles in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics and Political Behavior. Furthermore, he has consulted on more than 47 court cases.

STEPHEN K. WEGREN received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1990. He is a Professor in the political science department at SMU. Starting in Fall 2006, Professor Wegren became the Director for International and Area Studies. His most notable fellowships and honors include two grants from the National Council on Eurasian and East European Research; a Social Science Research Council Post-doctoral fellowship; several grants from IREX; John D. MacArthur pre-and post-doctoral fellowships at Duke University, numerous fellowships at Columbia University, and he is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He is the author of over six dozen articles and book chapters on various aspects of reform in post-communist states. His single-authored and edited books include: Land Reform in the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (1998); Agriculture and the State in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (1998), which won the Hewett award for best book in political economy from AAASS in 1999; Rural Reform in Post-Soviet Russia (2002); The Land Question in Ukraine and Russia (2002); Russian Policy Challenges: Security, Stability, and Development (2003); Building Market Institutions in Post-Communist Agriculture: Land, Credit, and Assistance (2004); Russia’s Food Policies and Globalization (2005); The Moral Economy Reconsidered: Russia’s Search for Agrarian Capitalism (2005); and Rural Adaptation in Russia (2005).

J. MATTHEW WILSON received his B.A. from Louisiana State University (1994), and his M.A. (1997) and Ph.D. (1999) from Duke University. He is currently Associate Professor of Political Science at Southern Methodist University.

In his first few years at SMU, Professor Wilson has received grants supporting his research from a variety of internal and external sources, including the American Political Science Association, the Southern Political Science Association, the University Research Council, and the John G. Tower Center for Political Studies. He has also received a teaching fellowship from the Cary M. Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility for his development of a course on religion and politics.

Professor Wilson’s research and teaching interests are in the areas of public opinion, elections, religion and politics, and political psychology. He has published articles in a variety of professional journals, including The American Journal of Political Science and The Journal of Politics. He is currently at work on two book projects, one on the political behavior of American Catholics and another, entitled The Blame Game: Political Sophistication and the Politics of Attribution, dealing with how citizens decide who to hold accountable for social and political outcomes.

2007-2008 Post-Doctoral Teaching Tower Fellows:

CHELSEA BROWN received her PhD (2007) from the University of North Texas. She has an MBA (2002) from Texas Christian University and an MSc (2002) from ESC in Dijon, France. Prior to SMU, she was a visiting professor at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and also worked for the Foreign Agricultural Service in Moscow. She specializes in comparative political economy, and her research interests include political and economic development, foreign policy, democracy, and globalization. Currently, she is working on a project that examines the effects of financial market development on inequality and poverty.

J. MARK SKORICK received his Ph.D. from Texas A&M University in 2005. He has taught courses in international relations, foreign policy, and terrorism at Texas A&M and the University of Kansas. His areas of specialization include foreign policy decision making, US foreign policy, and political psychology. Skorick's current research focuses on how emotions influence the manner in which people make sense of and respond to important foreign policy events. He has published papers in the Journal of Conflict Resolution and International Interactions, and has a chapter on emotions and foreign policy event interpretation (co-authored with Nehemia Geva) in the forthcoming book, Feeling Politics.