Bert A. Rockman, Ph.D.
Bert Rockman is currently Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Purdue University. Since his “retirement” in 2016, he also has been Visiting Scholar and also Adjunct Professor from 2016-2022 in the Political Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh. He was Head of the Department at Purdue from 2005-2012 and Professor from 2005-2016. Previous to that, he had been Director of the School of Public Policy and Management (now The John Glenn College of Public Affairs) at Ohio State University. He also held The University Professorship in Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh at which he also held appointments in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs and as a Research Fellow in the University’s Center for International Studies. Rockman also has been a Senior Fellow in the Governmental Studies Program of The Brookings Institution in Washington.
Rockman has been a Fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences and at Nuffield College at Oxford University. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Sao Paulo, Hebrew University, and National Taipei University, and on multiple occasions a visiting scholar at Fudan University. He also has held appointments at Georgetown University and UCLA.
Prof. Rockman is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, a recipient of the Herbert A. Simon Award for lifetime contributions to the scientific study of bureaucracy, the Richard E. Neustadt Award for the best book on the US Presidency, and the Pi Sigma Alpha Award for best paper at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. He also was a co-recipient of the Ulrich Kloeti Award in 2014 for distinguished service by the Research Committee of the Structure and Organization of Government of the International Political Science Association. In addition, he was co-author of an article recognized by Public Administration Review in 2015 as one of the 75 most impactful articles in PAR’s 75-year history.
He has been President of the Presidency Research Group of the American Political Science Association and President of the Midwest Caucus for Public Administration. He served eight years as co-editor of the international scholarly journal, Governance, an official journal of the International Political Science Association. He has also been Chair of the APSA’s Publications Committee and has served on the editorial boards of numerous journals, including the APSR and AJPS. He also has been – and continues to be – a book series editor.
Rockman has been a consultant to National Public Radio, The World Bank, the City University of Hong Kong, the Personnel Office of Japan, the U.S. Department of State, the Canadian Center for Management Development, and to numerous other organizations. He has lectured extensively in the United States and abroad.
He has authored or edited 17 books and has published well over a hundred journal articles and book chapters. He is currently co-editing and contributing to an edited volume on the Trump presidency to be published in 2023, and is also working on a co-authored book on Reimagining American Politics, an effort to understand the American past in order to come to terms with the American present. He also has been working on the relationship between populism and political institutions, particularly the administrative apparatus. In addition, he also presented papers on the U.S. health care reform in Berlin and The Hague and lectured on the U.S. health care system in comparative perspective at the University of Pittsburgh and Clemson University, and the intertwining of politics and policy in regard to health care reform at Carnegie- Mellon University. He served as treasurer of the APSA Section on Health Politics and Policy for three years.
Rockman’s body of work focuses mainly on executive politics, including the bureaucracy and the presidency, and the policy process. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and his A.B. from the University of Pittsburgh.