Alexander M. Crenshaw Professor of Public PolicyProfessor of Public Administration and Policy
Dr. Whitford serves as the Alexander M. Crenshaw Professor of Public Policy in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia. His research concentrates on strategy and innovation in public policy and organization studies. Current topics include agile government, moral hazard in public policy, and the use and regulation of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.
Dr. Whitford is Co-Editor of the Cambridge Elements Series in Public and Nonprofit Administration, a new publication channel for the research community. He is also an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. He received the 2017 Herbert A. Simon Award for “significant contribution to the scientific study of bureaucracy.”
His most recent book, Above Politics: Bureaucratic Discretion and Credible Commitment, was published in 2016 in the Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions series of Cambridge University Press. Written with Gary J. Miller of Washington University in St. Louis, this book is about the most recent financial crisis and how the regulatory state shapes markets, economic performance, and innovation. This book received the American Political Science Association’s 2017 Gladys M. Kammerer Award for US national public policy, the International Political Science Association’s 2017 Levine Prize for comparative administration and public policy, and the 2016 Book of the Year Award of the Section of Public Administration Research (SPAR) of the American Society of Public Administration. Dr. Whitford’s first book, Presidential Rhetoric and the Public Agenda: Constructing the War on Drugs, written with Jeff Yates of Binghamton University, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2009. This book is about narcotics control in the US and how presidents have used the War on Drugs as a political strategy.
Dr. Whitford’s research papers have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as the Administrative Science Quarterly, the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the American Journal of Public Health, and the American Journal of Political Science.
Dr. Whitford is also Visiting Honorary Senior Research Associate in the School of Public Policy at University College London and Research Fellow in Arizona State University’s Center for Organization Research and Design. He has also spent time at the University of Manchester as Hallsworth Visiting Professor in Political Economy, at the National University of Singapore as a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar, in Germany as a Fulbright German Studies Seminar Scholar, and at the University of Michigan as a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research.
