Susan Rose-Ackerman, Political Science and Law
Susan Rose-Ackerman (PhD ’70) became the first woman to hold tenure in the Political Science Department when she joined the faculty in 1987 with a joint appointment in the Law School. She has been described as “the person who helped launch the modern economic analysis of corruption” in politics. She received a PhD in economics from Yale in 1970, and her work on corruption began early in her career as an exploration of connections between politics and economics. “Corruption,” she writes, “occurs when market-like incentives show up where they’re not supposed to–inside government programs when officials interact with the public and with business. Economic analysis can help us to understand why this occurs and to design policies to confront it.” She has also conducted research related to federalism, the not-for-profit sector, and environmental policy. Her current research concentrates on the comparative law and politics of public policymaking, and has written a book forthcoming next year entitled Democracy and Executive Power: Policymaking Accountability in the US, the UK, Germany, and France. Over the years, she has sought to communicate her work on corruption and reform to non-academic audiences worldwide.
Rose-Ackerman was the only woman in her year in grad school in the Economics Department at Yale in the 1960s. She notes that as a teaching assistant, many of her students (then all-male) seemed surprised, at first, to have a woman at the front of the class. But she had supportive graduate advisors and friendly peers who helped her thrive as a student. Although gender disparities in economics are more extreme than in political science, the latter is not exempt from the widespread gender imbalance in much of academia. Today, while roughly 50% of graduate students in political science are women, that is only true for around 25% of tenured faculty, although this number represents a fivefold increase from 1980.
Rose-Ackerman notes that her role as an academic supervisor and mentor has been an important part of her career as a faculty member, stating, “One of the things that I value most about being a professor is the opportunity for the close supervision of graduate students. I think that I have been especially good at helping all kinds of students make the leap from student to professor and scholar.” Rose-Ackerman encourages her students to come up with their own research questions and to seek out advice and assistance from many sources in order to do the best original work possible. Political science, she notes, is a heterogeneous field where scholars make use of various methods to conduct their research—gathering knowledge from many different perspectives can only enrich their own work.
Selected works of Susan Rose-Ackerman:
- Rose-Ackerman, S., Egidy, S., & Fowkes, J. (2015). Due Process of Lawmaking: The United States, South Africa, Germany, and the European Union. Cambridge University Press.
- Rose-Ackerman, S., & Palifka, B. J. (2016). Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences, and Reform. 2d ed. [1st ed., 1999], Cambridge University Press.
- Rose-Ackerman, S. (1978). Corruption: A Study in Political Economy. Academic Press.
Profile by Sarah Babinski, PhD candidate in Linguistics