Robert Putnam, the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, is the recipient of the 2018 Karl Deutsch Award by the International Political Science Association.
The award honors a prominent scholar engaged in cross-disciplinary research, and the recipient presents the Karl Deutsch lecture at the IPSA World Congress of Political Science. The Karl Deutsch Award recipient for 2014 was also a member of the Harvard Kennedy School faculty, Pippa Norris, Paul F. McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics.
Karl Wolfgang Deutsch was a social and political scientist born in Prague who immigrated to the United States in the 1930s. His academic career included faculty appointments at Harvard, MIT, and Yale.
Putnam is a prominent political and social scientist and author. His books include the best-selling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, and more recently, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, a groundbreaking examination of the growing opportunity gap.
Putnam's 2010 book, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, coauthored with David Campbell of Notre Dame, won the American Political Science Association's 2011 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for the best book on government, politics, or international affairs. His earlier book, Making Democracy Work, was praised by the Economist as “a great work of social science, worthy to rank alongside de Tocqueville, Pareto, and Weber.”
Putnam consults widely with national leaders, including the last three American presidents and the last three British prime ministers. He co-founded the Saguaro Seminar at the Kennedy School, bringing together leading thinkers and practitioners to develop actionable ideas for civic renewal.
Putnam is now working on a major empirical project about 20th century economic, social, and political trends and the implications for American culture.
In June, Putnam will receive an honorary degree from the University of Oxford, citing him “as one of the leading scholars in social research on contemporary social and political developments.”