Wang named Vilas Associate
La Follette School Associate Professor Yang Wang is a 2025-26 winner in the coveted Vilas Associates Competition.
The award is given by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research to faculty doing impactful, high-quality research. Wang was one of just 20 UW-Madison faculty members to receive the award this year.
Her Vilas-funded research will explore intergenerational longevity and the social policies that may address health disparities across generations in the United States.
A 2003 alumna of the La Follette School of Public Affairs, Wang received her doctorate degree in economics from Duke University. Wang returned to her alma mater as a member of the La Follette School faculty in fall 2016. Her primary research interests are in applied microeconomics, health economics, and applied econometrics.
Wang was also recently selected for the 2025 Kohl Competition to work on a project examining the effectiveness of Wisconsin’s Family Care program in increasing the utilization of home-and-community-based services and enhancing care quality among older adults.
Yackee’s paper wins Kenneth J. Meier Award
The Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) awarded La Follette School Director Susan Webb Yackee and her co-authors the 2025 Kenneth J. Meier Award for the best paper in bureaucratic politics, public administration, or public policy.
Yackee’s paper, “I’m a Survivor: Political Dynamics in Bureaucratic Elites’ Partisan Identification,” challenges the assumption in political science that government leaders do not shift their party identification over time. It was published in the American Political Science Review, considered the top political science journal in the world.
By studying the partisanship of leaders of state government agencies across time, Yackee’s research found strong evidence that bureaucratic elites adjust their party support in the same direction as the shift in partisanship of the elected officials they work for.
“It’s an honor to receive the Kenneth J. Meier Award from MPSA for this project that my co-authors and I worked incredibly hard on,” Yackee says. “We hope these insights can lead to future research that explores changes in leaders’ behavior and policy decisions, especially as many experts believe agency independence is waning.”
Yackee also wrote a piece for the London School of Economics that detailed the findings of the paper.
Co-authors for the award-winning article included Benny Geys from the BI Norwegian Business School and Per Laegreid and Zuzana Murdoch from the University of Bergen. The research team presented an earlier version of the paper during La Follette’s Seminar Series in September 2023.
Yackee and her collaborators were recognized for the award during the MPSA Business Meeting and Award Ceremony on Saturday, April 5, 2025, in Chicago.