The International Public Policy Association is pleased to announce Professor Richard Rose as the 2018-19 winner of the biennial IPPA Career Award. The terms of the award require nominees to have made a focused, sustained, and distinctive contribution to policy studies, both in practice and in theory. Professor Rose’s remarkable career easily meets and exceeds this expectation.

Professor Rose received his undergraduate training at Johns Hopkins University. He pursued further studies at the London School of Economics, and then completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford.  He has held positions at the University of Manchester (1961-1966), the University of Strathclyde, and the University of Aberdeen (2005-2011).  He is currently Director of the Centre for the Study of Public Policy and Professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland.  He is a Visiting Professor at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin and the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute, Florence.

From his base in Scotland, Richard Rose pioneered the study of comparative politics and public policy in Europe. The Centre for the Study of Public Policy at the University of Strathclyde, which he founded in 1976, was the first dedicated public policy institute at a European university. He was also the founder of the Journal of Public Policy.  His work has had global impact on the discipline: his writings have been translated into 18 languages, and he has been invited to speak at seminars and conferences in 45 countries on six continents. He has received many other awards in addition to the IPPA Career Award.

In advancing the study of public policy, Richard Rose has produced many comparative books, starting with Can Government Go Bankrupt? and Understanding Big Government, both of which became staples on the curriculum of British and European universities.  These books were followed by others on public employment, taxation, laws, and inheritance in public policy including The Problem of Party Government. He also made singular contributions to the comparative study of political leaders with Presidents and Prime Ministers, The Post-Modern President: The White House Meets the World and The Prime Minister in a Shrinking World.

His co-authored book on Inheritance in Public Policy illuminated the neglected role of time in public policy decision-making. Another key area in which Professor Rose has been innovative and a world leading scholar has been in his work on policy diffusion and transfer. Rose’s work has travelled and been extensively used not only across the subfields of public policy but also in other cognate fields such as political geography. Today, this body of work on ‘lesson-drawing’ stands prominently in the core readings of syllabi on public policy. In Lesson-Drawing in Time and Space, Rose developed a theoretically informed study of the circumstances in which lessons can be learned from other countries, and the book remains the standard and seminal source in the field.  This was followed up by Learning from Comparative Public Policy: A Practical Guide, indicating his interest in the real-world ramifications of policy scholarship.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1991 Rose created the New Europe Barometer and New Russia Barometer. These are surveys to monitor mass response to the transformation of the former Communist societies. This took him deeper into the comparison of governance and policy systems, yielding two books on the subject: Democracy and Its Alternatives and Understanding Post-Communist Transformation. His latest book in 2018 Bad Corruption and Governance explores why the role of corruption varies greatly between public services, between people, between national systems of governance, and between measures of corruption

Over his distinguished career, Professor Rose has made incisive and lasting contributions to key issues in the study and practice of public policy. He has helped us think in fresh ways about governance, political leadership, comparative public policy, and even – a sense relevant to our discipline – about time and space.