Vital Statistics on American Politics 2015-2016

Harold W. Stanley is the Geurin-Pettus Distinguished Chair in American Politics and Political Economy at Southern Methodist University (SMU). In 1979, he joined the University of Rochester Department of Political Science and served as its chair from 1996 to 1999. Known as an expert in American national politics and electoral change in the South, Stanley currently serves as associate provost at SMU. Richard G. Niemi is Don Alonzo Watson Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester, where he has taught for forty-five years and has served as department chair, associate dean for graduate studies, and interim dean. He earned his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1967. Professor Niemi has been a Guggenheim fellow and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Lund (Sweden) and at the University of Iowa. In 2007–2009 he was president of the American Political Science Association’s Section on State Politics and Policy. He is a foreign member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of numerous works on political socialization, civic education, voting behavior, and various aspects of state politics. He has an ongoing interest in the Native Americans of upstate New York and Wisconsin, from whom he can trace a portion of his ancestry.