Michael McDonald, born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, USA, in 1951. Ph.D. from Florida State University, Tallahassee. Associate Professor of Political Science at the State University of New York, Binghamton.
Fellow (1 September 1995 – 30 June 1996)
My year at NIAS is divisible into four parts.
The majority of my time has been devoted to our theme group’s collective project on “Political Parties and the Quality of Democracy”. In association with my colleagues on the project I completed and presented two papers that, with revision, will result in two of the three core analytic chapters in the our book.
Second, outside the group, I completed three papers, and a fourth paper is about two-thirds of the way to completion. The work on those four papers followed from ideas I had in mind when I arrived at NIAS — in regard to American political parties, the single-member district electoral system, voting rights in the United States, and the presidential role in congressional coalitions formation.
Third, I laid the foundation for working on ideas about the ideology of parties, the formation of minority governments, and social science epistemology that arose from close as well as casual association with political scientists and historians at NIAS and elsewhere in Europe. Along the way, I made four presentations — two to political scientists gathered in Oslo, one to Dutch political scientists gathered at Leiden University, and one to Dutch Fulbright Alumni gathered in Wassenaar.