As a former President of the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), I am very pleased to be a featured speaker on the contributions of social and behavioral research to public policy and to help celebrate the Consortium's twentieth anniversary. In my talk this afternoon, I want to address the important issue of expanding the domain of policy-relevant scholarship in the social sciences.

The White House 2001 Project includes two programs designed to ease the entry into office of new administration members. The two are the White House Interview Program (WHIP) and Nomination Forms Online (NFO).

White House transitions and operations are the focus of our transition preparation program because of the central position of staff in governing. A year prior to coming onto the presidential ticket with Governor Bush, Richard Cheney spoke of the critical importance of the White House staff to whatever it is a president does: “It's crucial in terms of how he's going to function as president, whether or not he's effective. His reach, his ability to sort of guide and direct the government, to interact with the cabinet, to deal effectively with the Congress, to manage his relationship with the press, all of those are key ingredients to his success.” It is the White House staff that on a daily basis manages those crucial relationships.

That the White House had no institutional memory—the problem prompting the White House Interview Program (WHIP)—represents just one area in which the White House 2001 Project affected the presidential transition. In appointments, the Pew Charitable Trusts identified a second transition problem. In 1996, the Twentieth Century Fund produced a blue-ribbon study outlining several issues undermining the appeal of government appointment. The study, entitled Obstacle Course: The Report of the Twentieth Century Task Force on Presidential Appointment Process, convinced Pew to focus on the recruitment of presidential nominees. As part of that initiative, they contemplated a computer program that would reduce the burden placed on nominees by filing numerous, intrusive, and repetitive questionnaires.

Attracting the most talented citizens to public service has been a challenge for America's leaders since the inception of our nation. Thomas Jefferson expressed concerns about finding honest and capable public servants for his administration, pledging “to seek out the best through the whole Union.” No executive duty “excites more anxious concern…” Jefferson wrote. “No duty, at the same time, is more difficult to fulfill.”

Our Transition to Governing Project is dedicated to understanding and improving the transition from campaigning to governing. Started in 1998, the project is an American Enterprise Institute project in conjunction with the Brookings Institution and the Hoover Institution funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Norman Ornstein, AEI, and Thomas Mann, Brookings, are codirectors, and John Fortier, AEI, manages the effort. The project has addressed the transition in three broad areas: (1) facilitation of the transition of a new administration into office; (2) scholarly analysis of the blurring of the lines between campaigning and governing, sometimes referred to as the “permanent campaign”; (3) improvement of the quality of the presidential campaign by focusing media attention on the governing qualities of the candidates.

At one level, George W. Bush's transition to the presidency was unique and without much precedent as a guide. Unlike the situation facing his predecessors, Bush's “official” postelection transition did not begin until December 14, the day after Al Gore's concession speech. Roughly half the time of a “normal” transition had been lost as the controversy over the Florida vote dragged on.

It was to be the single most visible decision of George W. Bush's first year in office, inspiring even a rare prime-time televised address to announce and explain to the American people his decision on government support for stem cell research. For weeks, the White House press office told of the President's wide-ranging search for advice: the meetings with ethicists and scientists, with interest group representatives, and with dozens of ordinary citizens.

Nothing challenges a new President's team more than its need to fill out the executive. The White House 2001 Project played a significant role in this aspect of the presidential transition. Its White House Interview Program provided useful information gleaned from the rarified ranks of White House personnel, and its Nomination Forms Online Program detailed for the first time the exact particulars of the inquiry process. Already well under way by the time the Bush team began planning in 1999, the White House 2001 Project provided the Bush staff with details about two of the five great transition challenges affecting personnel: scale and complexity.

When terrorists struck on September 11, 2001, President Bush's responses would develop from information and decision-making channels established well before he entered the White House. Organizational work during the transition and people he brought into his administration shaped the structure he needed to respond. While transitions color the start of an administration and its goodwill, they are even more significant for how the administration operates.

The early months of a new presidency represent the most important period for establishing the tone and character of the White House's relationship with Congress. It is the time of closest scrutiny and the greatest vulnerability to making major mistakes. Taking the right steps early and avoiding errors can lay the foundation for a productive working relationship. Actions taken early create lasting impressions.

Even before the 36-day fandango following the election, George W. Bush and his team focused both on the presidential transition and the initial days of the presidency. Bush and chief political adviser Karl Rove had read history, examining how previous presidents had handled their initial phases in transition and in office; early on, Rove cautioned reporters and analysts to watch not the first 100 days but the first 180 days for an early measure of the president's capacity and success.

The circumstances of the 2000–2001 presidential transition will never be repeated, or at least I hope not for the sake of all concerned. Nevertheless, what we planned and what actually happened are highly relevant to future transition efforts. Most observers agree that the Bush-Cheney Administration got off to a strong start in large part because it made good use of the time available to it during the abbreviated transition period. Understanding this may help future presidents-elect plan their own transitions.

They called me Sisyphus at the White House. While bearing no resemblance to the Greek king of Corinth who rolled boulders up a mountain in Hades, I pushed nominees up Capitol Hill, helping them win Senate confirmation. And like Sisyphus, my work often came cascading back over me, in the form of delayed hearings, stalled nominees and requests for additional information from Congress.

Although political campaigns have long been thought to have relatively minimal effects, recent literature suggests a more definitive role for campaigns in determining election outcomes. This articles contributes to this growing body of research by focusing on a campaign that is widely viewed (albeit in the absence of much empirical analysis) as having been decisive—the presidential campaign of 1948.

With the 2000 census showing very large increases in Latino urban populations, the issues of minority incorporation and interracial coalition are becoming more complicated than politics in black and white. Will Latino participation resemble the patterns of African Americans, in which minority mobilization relied in part on the support of ideological liberals? Or will the path taken by Latinos be qualitatively different from that of African Americans?

Although “the ties between women's rights movements and nonviolence have been deep and enduring,” women's movements are not the only movements to rely upon nonviolent collective action. The Indian nationalist movement with Gandhi innovated with passive resistance; the U.S. black civil rights movement employed nonviolent civil disobedience as its major collective action; and peace and environmental movements in the 1980s and 1990s have employed nonviolent tactics. The ties between women's movements and nonviolence, however, are notable insofar as nonviolent tactics predominate in the collective action repertoires of women's movements (Rucht forthcoming). Because nonviolent tactics prevail, they are more visibly connected to those movements.

There is still a controversy over adjusting the census because the statistical adjustment of the census did not work in 1990, nor did it work in 2000. The adjustment process, in both theory and practice, is complicated and flawed. The chance of it working in future censuses without major changes is small. Anderson and Fienberg continue to twist language and report partial results in order to confuse the debate.

We appear to agree with Brunell on four factual matters:

1. “Census 2000 is over; the debate over adjusting the census is not”.

2. The computer coding error in 1990 would not have erroneously shifted any congressional seats has adjusted data been used for reapportionment.

3. In March 2001, the Census Bureau announced that it was “unable to conclude … that the adjusted Census 2000 data are more accurate for redistricting.”

4. The Census Bureau has refused to release the adjusted 2000 census data.

Otherwise we find Brunell's arguments against census adjustment either distorted or confused.