American Political Science Association

• 1. Introduction

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  The American Political Science Association was born in the Tilton Memorial Library of Tulane University in New Orleans in 1903, at a moment when political science was still staking its claim as a serious academic discipline. The questions that animated its founders have never gone away: How do governments actually work? Who holds power, and how do they use it? What can scholars do to help citizens understand all of it?

  Over more than a century, APSA grew from a small gathering of academics into a sprawling professional home for thousands of researchers, teachers, and practitioners. Its headquarters today sit in a building in Washington, D.C., that once belonged to a naval admiral, a labor leader, and the son of a president. That address alone tells you something about how deeply political science has wound itself into the fabric of American public life.

  This is the story of an association that has hosted a future president, broken barriers for women and African Americans, and sent fellows to work inside Congress itself.

• 2. A Founding in New Orleans

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  Tulane University's Tilton Memorial Library, the room where APSA held its founding meeting in 1903, is now called Tilton Hall. That small detail hints at how much has shifted around the association while it kept building forward. Political science at the turn of the twentieth century was still carving out space among the established university disciplines, and a professional association was one way to claim that space formally.

  Frank J. Goodnow served as APSA's first elected president, taking the chair for the 1904-1905 term. The early presidents read like a who's-who of American intellectual life. James Bryce, who held the presidency for 1907-1908, brought a transatlantic perspective to the role. Then came Abbott Lawrence Lowell in 1908-1909, followed immediately by Woodrow Wilson, who led the association for the 1909-1910 term before going on to govern New Jersey and then the entire country.

  The early decades also produced a roster of names that still appear in political science syllabi: Charles E. Merriam in 1924-1925, Charles A. Beard in 1925-1926, and Harold D. Lasswell in 1955-1956. Each one-year term passed the gavel to a different corner of the discipline.

• 3. The Washington Headquarters

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  APSA's current address, 1527 New Hampshire Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., carries an unusually layered history. The building sits within the Dupont Circle Historic District, and its past owners span a remarkable range of American life. Admiral George Remy owned it at one point. So did Samuel Gompers, the labor leader. The American War Mothers held it for a time. Harry Garfield, son of President James A. Garfield and himself a president of APSA from 1921 to 1922, also owned the property.

  The purchase of this building happened during Ralph J. Bunche's presidency of APSA, which ran from 1953 to 1954. Bunche was the first African American to serve as APSA president, and the acquisition of a permanent home in Washington during his term gave the association a physical stake in the city where American political power is concentrated.

  That the address connects Bunche, Gompers, a naval admiral, and a president's son under one roof is not mere trivia. It maps the intersections of academic, military, labor, and political history that APSA sits at the center of.

• 4. Breaking Barriers

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  In 1969, Mae C. King became the first woman and first African-American woman to serve as Senior Staff Associate for APSA. Her appointment came during a period of deep social upheaval in the United States, and it marked a turning point in how the association staffed itself.

  Almost four decades later, Dianne Pinderhughes became the first African-American woman to serve as president of APSA, holding that position for the 2007-2008 term. Pinderhughes followed Robert Axelrod in the presidential rotation, and her term preceded Peter Katzenstein's. The list of APSA presidents from the 1980s onward grows steadily more diverse, including Judith N. Shklar in 1989-1990, Elinor Ostrom in 1996-1997, Theda Skocpol in 2002-2003, and Carole Pateman in 2010-2011.

  Susan Stokes of the University of Chicago holds the current presidency for 2025-2026, with Beth Simmons already designated as President-Elect. The one-year term structure means the leadership cycles quickly, and that turnover has gradually widened the range of perspectives at the association's top.

• 5. Publishing and Research

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  Four journals anchor APSA's publishing program: the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Political Science Education, and PS: Political Science and Politics. Those four sit at the center, but they do not tell the whole story. APSA's organized sections publish or are associated with fifteen additional journals, spreading the association's reach across dozens of research subfields.

  The Centennial Center for Political Science and Public Affairs opened in 2003, exactly one hundred years after the association's founding. It offers fellowships, conference space, research facilities, and grants for scholars. Individual grants from the center range from $500 to $10,000 depending on the research fund, covering travel, interviews, archival access, and research assistant costs.

  APSA also administers Pi Sigma Alpha, the honor society for political science students. That student-facing role ties the professional apparatus of the association to the classroom, connecting working researchers with the next generation of political scientists.

• 6. Reaching Beyond Borders

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  With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, APSA organized a series of political science workshops across Africa. The first of these APSA Africa Workshops convened in Dakar, Senegal, in partnership with the West African Research Center, running from the 6th of July through the 27th of July 2008.

  The workshops are annual and residential, each running three weeks and bringing together as many as thirty scholars. A joint team of U.S. and African organizers leads each session. The target audience is mid- and junior-level scholars who are based in Africa, working in both East and West Africa. Each workshop covers research methodologies, substantive political science questions, and reviews of ongoing research.

  The Congressional Fellowship Program, running since 1953, complements this international reach with a domestic one. It places political scientists, journalists, federal employees, health specialists, and other professionals directly on Capitol Hill, where they work on congressional staffs and observe the legislative process from the inside.

• 7. A Discipline in Sections

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  APSA's 52 organized sections reveal how wide the field of political science has grown since 1903. The list runs from Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations at one end to Formal Theory, International Relations Theory, and South Asian Politics at the other. Sections on Race, Ethnicity and Politics; Sexuality and Politics; and Class and Inequality sit alongside older groupings like Legislative Studies and Law and Courts.

  Each section can award recognition to researchers independently. In total, the organized sections present over two hundred awards annually. Those awards are given at business meetings and receptions that run alongside the main APSA Annual Meeting, which itself takes place on Labor Day weekend each summer and stands as one of the largest gatherings of political scientists anywhere in the world.

  The APSA Teaching and Learning Conference runs as a separate, smaller working group event, focused specifically on pedagogy rather than research findings. It gives instructors a dedicated space to share teaching methods without competing for attention with the larger conference's research agenda. The existence of that separate conference points to APSA's dual commitment to the production of knowledge and to how that knowledge gets passed on.