Minutes

New Political Science Section Business Meeting

American Political Science Association Annual Meeting

              Chicago, Illinois

                                                            September 2, 2004

            The New Political Science section held its annual business meeting at 6:00 pm on    September 2^nd,  2004 at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association with Manfred Steger,  Section Chair, presiding.  The agenda included the following items.

Reports

Report from the Chair

            Manfred Steger encouraged people to attend the plenary talk by Lani Guinier on Saturday at 8:30 pm.   The plenary would be followed by a reception at 10:00.  Manfred also announced the section’s awards which would be given out at the plenary preceding Guinier’s talk.  Frances Fox Piven was the recipient of the Charles A. McCoy career achievement award; Linda Faye Williams of the Michael Harrington book award; Linda Faye Williams of the Christian Bay best paper award; and the Chicago Chapter of the Lambda Defense Fund of the Piven and Cloward activist organization award.  Manfred concluded by thanking the many people who volunteered or participated in Section activities and served on committees.  He extended special thanks to Bruce Wright, our webmaster, for his work in improving the website and to Christine Kelly for her work  on the Labor Project being initiated by APSA as well as for always being available for assistance.

Minutes of 2003 Meeting

The minutes of the 2003 business meeting, circulated by Carl Swidorski the previous Fall, were unanimously approved.

Report of the Secretary-Treasurer (Attached)

            Carl Swidorski distributed copies of the 2003-2004 financial report.  The sections’s ending balance as of June 30, 2004 was $4544.50.  Expenses for the year were $773.48 while income totaled $2490.03.  Expenses associated with the annual plenary were limited once again through co-sponsoring the plenary with other sections and presenting a speaker who lived in the immediate area, thus eliminating the need to pay for travel or hotel expenses for the speaker.  However, Carl indicated that this year the Section would be paying the full expenses for the plenary speaker and additionally, had provided $1000.00, at the request of Program Chair Jennifer Disney, to partially pay for the expenses of bringing two political activists, Elaine Brown and Rania Masri to the conference.  Therefore, there would be significantly less in the treasury next year.  In order to address this matter and have funds available for similar activities next year, Carl reported that the Executive Committee of the journal had authorized an allocation of $2000.00 for the Section for next year.  The Executive Committee resolved at its annual business meeting on Wednesday evening, to make an annual assessment of journal and Section finances and provide an annual contribution ranging from $500.00 to $2000.00 in any given year.  Finally, Carl reported that the Executive Committee had decided to fund the Piven and Cloward award at the level of $500.00 for this year.

Report of 2004 Program Chair

            Jennifer Disney distributed a report on the program for this year’s conference.  She stated that panels were put together to address the intersectionality of class, race, gender, ethnicity and their relationship to international issues of imperialism and hegemony.  She was very successful in arranging co-sponsored panels.  Two panels were designated as theme panels co-sponsored with APSA.  Seven other panels were co-sponsored with the Women and Politics, Human Rights, Ecological and Transformational Politics, and Normative Political Theory sections.  Eight panels were offered directly by New Political Science.

            The section had a total of seventeen panels this year and one short course on Wednesday.  Jennifer stated she received twenty-eight panels proposals with eleven accepted.  Ninety-three papers were proposed and twenty accepted.  In addition, twelve poster proposals were accepted. 

Report of 2005 Program Chair

Bradley MacDonald stated that the theme of next years APSA meeting was “Mobilizing Democracy.”  He saw this theme as meshing with the Section’s traditional concerns of linking progressive politics to political action in the “real” world and wanted to put together a program reflecting these interests from a variety of contemporary perspectives.     

Report of Membership Chair/New Membership

            Manfred Steger introduced Clyde Barrow, the new chair of the membership committee.

Clyde reported on a new membership initiative, the “Recruit One New Member” campaign.  According to Clyde, about 15% of APSA members self-identify as “Leftists” yet only 2.8% of the membership belongs to our Section.  The plan is to have each existing member of the Section try to recruit one new member.  The initiative, if carried out, should be successful in increasing the number of members from its current level of just over 400 to well over 500 at minimum.  He also urged that special attention be paid to recruiting graduate students.  Clyde stated that APSA had said it was fine with them if we recruited members directly and forwarded the relevant information and the dues collected to them. 

New Political Science Journal Report

            Joe Peschek reported that the journal was doing well.  He circulated the table of contents of several recent issues and highlighted some of their contents.  Joe indicated that he was combining a reactive and proactive approach as editor.  In addition to monitoring the peer review process for manuscripts submitted, he was actively soliciting manuscripts, especially as related to certain theme issues or authors.  The journal continued to average about one theme issue per year.  He encouraged those individuals who were presenting papers at this year’s conference to submit their work to our journal.  Joe reminded the audience that Section members could subscribe to the journal for only $30.00, a very good bargain.  He indicated that the number of individual subscriptions from Section members remained quite low.

            Joe stated that the Executive Committee of the journal had a discussion of the book series and that it was in the process of initiating a reassessment of our relationship with our current publisher, Routledge.  Finally, Joe relayed the comments of our reviews editor, Mark Mattern, who is having some fairly serious health problems.  Mark indicated that he was planning on carrying on his work as editor and asked members to please submit their recently published books for review.

Revision of By-Laws

            John Berg reported that our by-laws, last modified in 1992, were in need of revision.  He distributed the existing by-laws with a series of suggested revisions which could be grouped into three basic categories.  First, we selected a Program Chair annually, not for a two-year term, and the Program Chair was not responsible for organizing panels at other meetings.  Second, the Publications Coordinator position should be eliminated.  Third, the Caucus listserv was to now replace the Caucus Assembly as the vehicle for making needed decisions in-between annual meetings.  The proposed revisions passed unanimously after an editorial amendment from the floor.

Election of Officers

            William Niemi of Western State College of Colorado was nominated and approved as 2006 Program Chair.  No other positions had vacancies for the coming year.

New Business

Christine Kelly presented information on a new Labor Project being undertaken within APSA.  The goal is to create a working group of political scientists aimed at increasing teaching and research on labor issues.  Incoming APSA President Margaret Levi had encouraged the formation of such a group.  Christine invites all interested parties to a meeting to launch the group on Saturday at 5:00 pm.  The meeting was being sponsored by New Political Science and the Human Rights section.

Representatives of graduate student organizers presented a resolution on graduate student organizing rights and asked the meeting to approve it.  The resolution stated support for the right of graduate student assistants at all universities to form unions and expressed disapproval of the July 2004 National Labor Relations Board decision that graduate student assistants at private universities are not “employees” in the meaning of the law and thus not entitled to the protections of the National Labor Relations Act.  The resolution passed unanimously.

            Further discussion took place about the issue. Suggestions from the floor included finding out the process for taking this issue up with APSA; presenting a panel at next year’s meeting; inviting submission on the topic to our journal; and providing funding for graduate student activists to attend APSA next year. Gordon Lafer informed the meeting that labor law reform was being considered in Congress and urged members to work on supporting the legislation.

Bertell Ollman suggested that given the problems with the 2000 presidential election and continuing reports of more possible illegal activity this year, the Caucus initiate a project of inviting other governments to send election observers to supervise the upcoming US elections.  Manfred Steger asked Bertell to spearhead the effort by sending out further information and organizing the project on our listserv

            Manfred ended the meeting with a request from members to contact him with suggestions for a plenary speaker for next year.

The meeting adjourned at 7:00 PM..

Respectfully submitted,

Carl Swidorski

Secretary/Treasurer