Susan Webb Yackee

Susan Webb Yackee is Director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs and a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Public Affairs and Political Science at UW-Madison.

Her research and teaching interests include the U.S. public policymaking process, public management, regulation, administrative law, 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 will receive the Herbert A. Simon Career Contribution Award from the Midwest Public Administration Caucus in April 2019. It is the highest award in the field of political science for the study of bureaucracy and public administration. Her 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 in the previous year.

Yackee is an elected member of the National Academy of Public Administration. She is an elected Board member for the Public Management Research Association and a member of the Board of Editors at the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Public Administration Review, and Perspectives on Public Management & Governance. She is currently working 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.