The Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs is dedicated to improving the design of public policy and the practice of governance.
The highly ranked program offers degrees in domestic and international degrees in public management and policy analysis.
A new study by La Follette School of Public Affairs public management expert Donald P. Moynihan describes the evolution of the federal performance management system since the passage of the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993. “The federal government has made progress recently in achieving meaningful performance results within targeted programs,” says the University of Wisconsin-Madison professor. “While [...]
A team of five students from the UW-Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs won first place for their strategies to combat childhood obesity in a national public affairs competition in Washington, D.C., March 22-23. Miriam Palmer, Selina Eadie, Andrew Walsh, Norma-Jean Simon and Jiaqi Lu won the Policy Solutions Challenge USA. They also won the Midwest regional competition held March 1-2 at Ohio State [...]
Several graduate programs from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Letters & Science are ranked among the nation’s best in the 2014 edition of U.S. News and World Report’s “Best Graduate Schools.” “We’re proud of all of our graduate programs and particularly pleased that once again many have been rated so highly,” says Provost Paul [...]
Five promising young faculty in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Letters & Science have been honored with Romnes Faculty Fellowships. The Romnes awards recognize exceptional faculty members who have earned tenure within the last four years. Selected by a Graduate School committee, winners receive an unrestricted $50,000 award for research, supported by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF). [...]
Five outstanding faculty members in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Letters & Science have been named winners of this year’s Kellett Mid-Career Awards. The Kellett award, supported by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, recognizes outstanding mid-career faculty members who are five to 20 years past the first promotion to a tenured position. Each winner, chosen [...]
Donald Nichols, whose tenure leading the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs helped shape Wisconsin’s economic development, died Feb. 15, at age 72. A professor emeritus of economics and public affairs, Nichols served as La Follette School director from 2002 to 2006. Nichols served on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers [...]
Fracking, the controversial technology for opening natural gas deposits, will be the focus of a three-part Community Environmental Forum series beginning on Tuesday, Oct. 30, at 5:30 p.m. in room 1106 of the Mechanical Engineering Building. “Fracking: The Wisconsin Connection” will explore topics including the process of fracking (short for hydraulic fracturing), why Wisconsin is [...]
Two La Follette School students won the U.S. Department of Energy portion of the Startup America Policy Challenge with their proposal about how to make solar energy more affordable. Sam Harms and Sam Shannon were in Washington, D.C., May 21 as part of the Startup America Policy Challenge announced by the White House in December [...]
Management expert Donald Moynihan has won an award from the American Political Science Association in recognition of the significant impact his 2008 book has had on public administration scholarship since its publication. Moynihan will receive the Herbert Simon award for The Dynamics of Performance Management: Constructing Information and Reform at the annual meeting of the [...]
Professor John Witte tends to learn a subject as he goes along. From industrial relations to education policy, the La Follette School political scientist accepts a challenge and becomes an expert. Kazakhstan is next on Witte’s agenda. After he retires this summer, Witte will head for Astana and become dean of the new School for [...]
As founder of the Guatemala-based Range of Motion Project (ROMP), Eric Neufeld ’98 has worked to provide more than 1,500 custom-made prosthetic limbs to people in developing countries since 2005—people who, without Neufeld’s help, might have never regained mobility. With B.A. in Biological Aspects of Conservation, Neufeld represents one of the 13 outstanding alumni of [...]
How an agency’s culture affects the actions the agency takes is illuminated in new research from public affairs scholar Donald Moynihan on the federal response to Hurricane Katrina. The U.S. Department of Defense’s initial response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was slowed by an agency culture that imposed red tape to limit engagement in crisis response and thus maintain autonomy, Moynihan finds.
University of Wisconsin–Madison public affairs professor Donald Moynihan has been elected a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, one of the youngest members to be elected since Congress chartered the academy in 1967. Moynihan is associate director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs. He focuses his research on the application of organization theory to public management issues such as performance, budgeting, homeland security, election administration and employee behavior. In particular, he studies the selection and implementation of public management reforms
Most Americans believe that with due sacrifice of time and effort anyone will be able to prosper and provide their children with a better life. But the reality is that children born into poor families in the United States tend to stay poor and children born into wealthy families generally stay rich.
In the summer of 2007, University of Wisconsin–Madison economist Menzie Chinn was among those who started to think something was amiss with the U.S. economy. Mortgage-backed securities were little-understood financial instruments, but Chinn remembers red flags going up as certain measures indicated that the AAA-rated versions of these securities were losing value.
“It’s really bad out there,” said Timothy Smeeding, director of the UW–Madison Institute for Research on Poverty. “I have never been so depressed. This report is the worst report I’ve seen in 30 years. We’re supposedly a year out of recession and things are still slipping.”
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Arkansas have found that a school voucher program in Milwaukee increases the likelihood of a student graduating from high school and enrolling in college.
The Wisconsin Alumni Association and the Office of the Secretary of the Faculty are honoring University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty with the 2011 Distinguished Teaching Awards. This year eight L&S faculty took home top teaching awards.
Three researchers with the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison received honors from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to explore the role housing plays in the long-term health and well-being of children, families and communities.
With two small children at home, Susan Webb Yackee goes through a lot of peanut butter. But although many Americans don’t think much about what’s in their peanut butter, Yackee is one of few who knows that the childhood favorite must contain at least 90 percent peanuts, as well as how that standard was established.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 contained temporary policy changes to offset or lessen the negative effects of the economic recession. These policies included provisions increasing refundable tax credits for families and larger nutrition assistance benefits for those enrolled in the program. Researchers at the UW-Madison Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) analyzed the effect of the tax and nutrition assistance portions of the ARRA on poverty in Wisconsin, using a broader, more complete measure of poverty developed at IRP.
La Follette School of Public Affairs Director Carolyn J. Heinrich has been elected to become a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, one of the youngest members to ever be elected since Congress chartered the academy in 1967.
Two public affairs professors, Pamela Herd and Timothy Smeeding, were recently featured in“Office Hours,” a half-hour weekly talk show produced at UW-Madison and shown on the Big Ten Network.
La Follette School alumna Elmira Mangum (’77, Public Policy, Urban & Regional Planning) is Cornell University’s new vice president for budget and planning. A seasoned administrator with more than 25 years of experience in executive higher education financial and resource management, Mangum says the training she received from what is now the La Follette School [...]
Researchers at the Institute for Research on Poverty released the second annual Wisconsin Poverty Report [pdf], which is based on the National Academy of Sciences poverty methodology and provides a new, more complete poverty measure. The measure was created as a service to the State of Wisconsin and as part of IRP’s cooperative research agreement [...]
A prize-winning author known for his global research on modern-day slavery will deliver a free public lecture this month at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as part of a daylong symposium on human trafficking.
The Food Assistance and Nutrition Research Program of U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service named the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) the UW–Madison as the RIDGE Center for National Food and Nutrition Assistance Research following a nationwide competition.
‘Tis the season and L&S faculty and students are racking up the awards – congratulations to all!
The William T. Grant Foundation awarded honors to Maria Cancian and Barbara (Bobbi) Wolfe…
La Follette School director Carolyn Heinrich has been awarded a $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences to expand her evaluation of federally mandated tutoring programs in public schools.
Outgoing La Follette School of Public Affairs Associate Director Menzie Chinn has won a $10,000 grant from the University of Wisconsin–Madison Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy to pursue his research on exchange rates and the world economy’s large current account imbalances.
Professor Donald Moynihan organized an April symposium at Monona Terrace involving 130 representatives from local government, state agencies, engineering firms, academia, non-profits and the Wisconsin Legislature in a discussion of “From Sandbags to Sanity: Policy Implications of the Floods of 2008.”
Two new co-edited volumes by La Follette School faculty address today’s pressing social policy problems.
