The George S. Parthemos Lecture will be hosted on April 5, 2021 via Zoom Dr. Frank R. Baumgartner. Click here to register now.

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Frank R. Baumgartner received his PhD from the University of Michigan and currently holds the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professorship in Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Much of his work focuses on how public policies are made in democracies, with particular attention to lobbying, issue-definition, framing, and agenda-setting including the role of the media and elections. He was co-creator of the Comparative Agendas Project, which tracks public policy activities over long periods of time. Over 20 national project teams are now active in this growing network, with hundreds of publications having resulted from the work.

More recently, he has developed a sustained research program on issues of racial disparity in the criminal justice system, having published two award-winning books on the death penalty and one on police traffic stops.

Over the course of his career, Professor Baumgartner has published articles in the most prestigious political science journals. He has also published 10 books and edited others. His book include: Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Chicago); The Politics of Attention (Chicago), and The Politics of Information (Chicago); Lobbying and Policy Change (Chicago); The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence (Cambridge); Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty (Oxford, co-authored with four UNC undergraduates); Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us about Policing and Race (Cambridge, co-authored with two UNC graduate students); and the edited volume Comparative Policy Agendas: Theory, Data, Tools (Oxford), representing the current state of the Comparative Policy Agendas project.

In addition to its tremendous breadth, Baumgartner’s work is recognized for its data driven clarity. His work has won prestigious awards, including the Aaron Wildavsky Award for an enduring contribution to the field of public policy (for Agendas and Instability); the Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the best book on US national policy (for The Decline of the Death Penalty); the Leon D. Epstein Outstanding Book Award on political organizations and parties (Lobbying and Policy Change); the Louis Brownlow Award for the best book in the field of public administration (for The Politics of Information); and the C. Herman Pritchett Best Book Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association (for Suspect Citizens). In 2011, Baumgartner received the Samuel J. Eldersveld Award for Career Achievement from the APSA section on political organizations and parties. In 2017, he was inducted as a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2019, Professor Baumgartner (along with his collaborators) were recognized with the Lijphart / Przeworski / Verba Dataset Award from the APSA Section on Comparative Politics for the Comparative Agendas Project.