The Centennial Center is a home away from home for political scientists working in DC. Through our Visiting Scholars Program, we host scholars from the United States and abroad as they conduct research or teach in the Washington, DC metropolitan area.
Located within the Association’s headquarters near Dupont Circle, the Centennial Center offers visiting scholars furnished shared workspace, a personal telephone, wifi, conference space, a small reference library, a digital resource library (including digital recording equipment for interviews), and free coffee and tea. There is no charge for a visiting scholar residency, but your APSA membership must be up-to-date.
Visiting scholars are encouraged to contribute to the intellectual life of the Association during their stay. This can include sharing their research via APSA’s blog, and brown bag presentations on their research. Visiting scholars are also offered the opportunity to contribute a summary of their research to the Center Page in PS: Political Science and Politics.
Interested in becoming a visiting scholar? Apply here. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis, and you can apply anywhere from one week to one year before your planned visit.
Current Visiting Scholars
Catherine Wineinger
Dr. Wineinger explores women’s political representation at the intersection of gender, race, and partisanship. Her current book project focuses on Republican Party politics and contributes to discussions of Republican women’s descriptive and substantive underrepresentation in Congress. She examines the ways Republican congresswomen claim to represent women and how they navigate intraparty gender dynamics in an era of heightened polarization.
Christian Fong
Dr. Fong is working on a book which will show that congresspeople, like most human beings, like to help those who have helped them and to retaliate against those who have wronged them. This dramatically differs from the standard account of how cooperation is sustained in Congress and other political institutions, which emphasizes the role the expectation of future rewards over past behavior. Yet this new backward-looking perspective provides a coherent explanation for the ebb and flow of leadership power, the emergence and dissolution of rules, and the changing nature of partisan competition in Congress.
Karen Beckwith
When new political parties form, do political opportunities open for women? What has been the impact of new political parties and new party system configurations on women’s representation within political parties, parliaments, and cabinets? What other actors, new to politics, have been brought into political institutions and the party system? In sum, do changes in party systems in democracies facilitate women’s inclusion in governance? Dr. Beckwith’s project addresses these questions by examining the intersection of institutions and political parties, focusing on four comparative cases: France, Italy, Sweden, and the US. It maps political party system changes in each case, identifying the emergence of new, electorally competitive political parties, shifts in the electoral performance of established parties, and the demise of previously competitive parties. It categorizes parties by party type and party family and investigates the transformations (and persistent stabilities) of party systems across time to analyze the impact of party system change on women’s political representation. The objective of the project is to understand the consequences of party system changes in democracies for women’s political representation.
Paul Musgrave
Dr. Musgrave’s book project looks at the evolution of congressional-executive relations through the lens of the development of party institutions and other informal institutions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is interested in seeing how these developments changed the ways that the formal powers of Congress and the presidency were exercised. He will be trying to understand how politics in Congress affects foreign policy in the modern era of polarization compared to the “textbook Congress” of the 1950s and 1960s.
Michael Baggesen Klitgaard
Michael Baggesen Klitgaard conducts research on government responsiveness toward policy demands raised by business interest groups. Klitgaard suggests that independent business influence is constrained and systematically moderated by electoral and fiscal concerns of democratic governments, and conducts cross-country empirical analysis of tax policy decision making in a number of economically advanced democracies. Klitgaard is a professor of political science at the University of Southern Denmark and held previously a visiting scholarship at the Minda de Gunzburg Centre for European Studies – Harvard University.