2006 Hubert H. Humphrey Award

Presented each year in recognition of notable public service by a political scientist.

Award Committee: Merle Black, Emory University, Chair; Jay Barth, Hendrix College; and M. Richard Zinman, Michigan State University

Recipient: William A. Galston, The Brookings Institution

Citation: This year's award recognizes William A. Galston of the Brookings Institution for his outstanding public service, deep involvement in vital questions of public affairs, and the quality and breadth of his scholarship in political science. 

The Humphrey Award honors involvement in public affairs. Galston is superbly qualified by his long record of personal involvement in policy making and advocacy. For more than three decades he has actively taken political science and theories about good public policy beyond the academy and into the arenas of national party politics and government at the highest levels in the United States. He has been especially influential in studying, advocating, and promoting the engagement of Americans in multiple dimensions of civic life.
 
His qualifications for the Humphrey Award extend beyond his direct engagement in public affairs. Throughout his career, Galston has sought to revive and exemplify the classical understanding of political science as a practical discipline—one that arises directly out of the characteristic conflicts of political life, takes its bearings from those conflicts, and seeks to provide impartial guidance to statesmen and citizens. Galston has played this role in two ways: On the one hand, he has attempted to demonstrate that liberalism (in the theoretical, not political, sense of term) is theoretically defensible and, indeed, superior to any of the available theoretical alternatives. On the other hand, while acknowledging that theory can never be a substitute for statesmanship, he has attempted to demonstrate, in speech and deed, that what he calls liberal pluralism is the best guide to the great domestic policy debates of our time. As a result, Galston's career is a model of the unity of theory and practice.

Galston was born on January 17, 1946. He graduated from Cornell University in 1967 and received his M.A. (1969) and Ph.D. (1973) from the University of Chicago. He is the author or co-author of 10 books and scores of articles in the fields of political theory, American politics, and public policy. He currently chairs the Task Force on Religion and Public Values National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Council for Excellence in Government. In 1993 and 1994 he was the Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy in the Clinton Administration. He has also been the Executive Director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal (1996-1999) and was the Founding Director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (2001-2005). In addition, Galston has been an active and influential participant in party politics, serving as a Senior Advisor in the 1988 and 2000 presidential campaigns of Al Gore, and as Issues Director in the 1984 presidential campaign of Walter Mondale. He is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where his work centers on the important topic of political polarization in the United States.

The 2006 Humphrey Award recognizes the achievements of an outstanding political scientist whose talents and energies have made him a respected and influential voice in modern public policy debates in American political life.