Susan Webb Yackee

Credentials: Director and Professor

Phone: 608-265-6017

Address:
109 Observatory Hill Office Building
1225 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706

About

Susan Webb Yackee is Director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs and a Collins-Bascom Professor of Public Affairs at UW–Madison.

Her research and teaching interests include the U.S. public policymaking process, public management, regulation, health policy, and interest group politics. Yackee has published articles in a number of journals, including the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Public Administration Review, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, British Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

Yackee received the 2019 Herbert A. Simon Career Contribution Mid-Career Award from the Midwest Public Administration Caucus. It is one of the highest awards in the field of political science for the study of bureaucracy and public administration. She also received the Kellett Mid-Career Award for her research from UW-Madison. Yackee’s article “Clerks or Kings? Partisan Alignment and Delegation to the U.S. Bureaucracy” (with Christine Palus) won the 2017 Beryl Radin Award for the best article published in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory.

Yackee is an elected member of the National Academy of Public Administration. In 2023, Yackee was appointed as a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS). In the past, she was an elected Board member for the Public Management Research Association and served as member of the Board of Editors at the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Public Administration Review, and Perspectives on Public Management & Governance. Yackee recently finished work on a $500,000 Innovations in Regulatory Sciences Award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund to study regulatory policymaking at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

In the past, Yackee was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She also served as a Smith Richardson Domestic Policy Fellow, a UW-Madison Vilas Associate Professor, a UW-Madison H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship, and a Harry S. Truman Scholar. As a junior scholar, Yackee’s research received four “Emerging Scholar Awards” from various professional associations. She worked as a legislative research assistant in the U.S. Senate before beginning her academic training.

Curriculum vitae (pdf)

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