Joseph LaPalombara

Joseph LaPalombara is the Arnold Wolfers Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Management, and a Senior Research Scholar in the Center for Comparative Research at Yale University. He is a member of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has held fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Twentieth Century Fund, the Social Science Research Council, and the Fulbright Program. He has been awarded the Medals of Honor by the Presidency of the Italian Republic and by the Italian Constitutional Court. He is editor-in-chief of Italy, Italy magazine, editor of the Journal of International Business Education and a member of the editorial boards of several scientific journals. He is best known for his contributions to the fields of comparative politics, comparative public administration, political development, Italian politics and the organization and behavior of international firms. He has analyzed the manner in which, in different societies, organized labor, business and religion enter the political process and, more important, impinge on the making and implementation of public policies. He served as chair of Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Studies for five years, and as Chair of its Department of Political Science for two three-year terms. He was for many years a member of the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Comparative Politics, which played a major role in broadening that sub-field to include non-Western areas of the world, as well as endowing it with greater concern for theory-building and empirical testing. For several years he also chaired the SSRC Foreign Area Fellowship Program. His current research is focused on the relationship between public policies, global corporations and the flow of foreign direct investment to less-developed countries. He is a founding member of CSS (Italian Social Science Council), and now one of its Honorary Members. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a past member of the National Committee for American Foreign Policy. He is currently the president of Reset Dialogues U.S.A., and organization centered in Rome, Italy; a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for American Studies (Rome) and is a past member of the Board of Trustees of the American Academy in Rome. Publications include: Politics Within Nations (1974); Democracy, Italian Style (1987); Multinational Corporations and Developing Countries (1981); and Stati uniti? Italia e USA a confronto (2009). LaPalombara received the A.B. (1947) and M.A. (1950) degrees in political science from the University of Illinois, and the A.M. (1952) and Ph.D. (1954) in politics from Princeton University.