Ann O’M. Bowman is the Hazel Davis and Robert Kennedy Endowed Chair in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. Throughout her academic career, the focus of her research and teaching has been state and local government and policy, and federalism and intergovernmental relations. She is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and is a Past President of the Southern Political Science Association. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Florida.
While on the faculty at the University of South Carolina, Dr. Bowman received a Lincoln Government Fellowship at the National League of Cities (NLC) in Washington, D.C. At NLC, she undertook a national study of city economic development policy. A few years later, she was awarded a Fulbright award to Denmark to serve as the Odense Distinguished Chair in American Studies. The Danish undergraduate students she taught, accustomed as they were to a unitary system of government, marveled at the logic and intricacies of the U.S. federal system.
The questions that have driven much of Dr. Bowman’s research typically involve intergovernmental relationships of various types. These include interactions between the national government and states (e.g., “Power Shift: Measuring Policy Centralization in U.S. Intergovernmental Relations”), among states (e.g., “Strength in Numbers: Why States Join Interstate Compacts”), between states and their local governments (e.g., “Second Order Devolution: Data and Doubt”), and among local governments (e.g., “Making Connections: Performance Regimes and Extreme Events”). Her exploration of these relationships considers issues of policy design and adoption as well as policy implementation.
Dr. Bowman has won the Donald C. Stone Award for Research given by the Section on Intergovernmental Administration and Management of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA). In 2016, she received the Daniel Elazar Distinguished Scholar Award from the Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations section of the American Political Science Association (APSA). She has been president of three organized sections of APSA: Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations, Public Policy, and Urban Politics, and recently completed a three-year term on the APSA Executive Council. Dr. Bowman has served as Book Review Editor for the Journal of Politics and Urban Affairs Review and has been a member of several editorial boards. Currently, she is a member of the Editorial Advisory Council of Publius: The Journal of Federalism.
