American political scientists

Donna Edna Shalala ( shə-LAY-lə; born February 14, 1941) is an American politician and academic who served in the Carter and Clinton administrations, as well as in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2019 to 2021. Shalala is a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which she was awarded in 2008, and, on August 16, 2023, assumed the role of Interim President of The New School, a university in New York City.
Shalala earned a bachelor's degree from Western College for Women in 1962 and served in the Peace Corps. In 1970, she earned a PhD from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Shalala later worked as a professor at Baruch College and at Teachers College, Columbia University and was appointed as assistant secretary for policy development and research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development by President Jimmy Carter. Shalala became the president of Hunter College in 1980, serving until 1988 when she became chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
From 1993 to 2001, Shalala served as the 18th United States Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Bill Clinton. Shalala served as HHS secretary for all eight years of the Clinton administration, becoming the nation's longest-serving HHS secretary. She is the first Lebanese-American to serve in a Cabinet position. Shalala served as president of the University of Miami from 2001 through 2015, and also taught at the university during that period. She was president of the Clinton Foundation from 2015 to 2017.
A member of the Democratic Party, Shalala was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 27th congressional district in 2018. She served one term in the House before being defeated in the 2020 election by María Elvira Salazar in an upset.

Elizabeth Ann Brown (August 15, 1918 – March 7, 2017) was an American foreign service officer. She was appointed Director of the Office of United Nations Political Affairs in 1965, and won the Federal Woman's Award in 1967.

Rodolfo O. de la Garza (August 17, 1942 – August 5, 2019) was an American political scientist.
De la Garza was born in Tucson, Arizona, on August 17, 1942. He attended Tucson High School, graduating in 1960 and earned a doctorate from the University of Arizona in 1972. He then worked for the United States Agency for International Development in South America. De la Garza began his teaching career at the University of Texas at El Paso, and later moved to the University of Texas at Austin, where he was Mike Hogg Professor of Community Affairs. In 2001, de la Garza joined the Columbia University faculty. At Columbia, he was appointed Eaton Professor of Administrative Law and Municipal Science. De la Garza died in New York City on August 5, 2019.

James Alfred Perkins (October 11, 1911 – August 19, 1998) was an American academic administrator who was the seventh president of Cornell University, from 1963 to 1969.

Arthur Doak Barnett (October 8, 1921, Shanghai – March 17, 1999 Washington, D.C.), known as A. Doak Barnett, was an American journalist, political scientist, and public figure who wrote about the domestic politics and the foreign relations of China and United States-China relations. He published more than 20 academic and public interest books and edited still others. Barnett's parents were missionaries in China, and Barnett used his Chinese language ability while travelling widely in China as a journalist before 1949. He grounded his journalism and his scholarship in exact detail and clear language. Starting in the 1950s, when there were no formal diplomatic relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China, he organized public outreach programs and lobbied the United States government to put those relations on a new basis.
Barnett taught at Columbia University from 1961–1969, then went to the Brookings Institution in 1969. In 1982, he was named the George and Sadie Hyman Professor of Chinese Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.

James C. Coomer (born May 20, 1939) is an American political scientist and Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Mercer University, and its former Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs. He is known for his early work on the conceptual foundations of the notion of the sustainable society.

Vincent Alfred Ostrom (September 25, 1919 – June 29, 2012) was an American political economist and the Founding Director of the Ostrom Workshop based at Indiana University and the Arthur F. Bentley Professor Emeritus of Political Science. He and his wife, the political economist Elinor Ostrom, made numerous contributions to the field of political science, political economy, and public choice.
The Ostroms made particular study of fragmentation theory, rational choice theory, federalism, common-pool resources and polycentrism in government. The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization published a special issue, "Polycentric Political Economy: A Festschrift for Elinor and Vincent Ostrom", as the proceedings of a 2003 conference held in their honor, at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Chalmers Ashby Johnson (August 6, 1931 – November 20, 2010) was an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics, and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. He served in the Korean War, was a consultant for the CIA from 1967 to 1973 and chaired the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley from 1967 to 1972. He was also president and co-founder with Steven Clemons of the Japan Policy Research Institute (now based at the University of San Francisco), an organization that promotes public education about Japan and Asia.Johnson wrote numerous books, including three examinations of the consequences of what he called the "American Empire": Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis; The Last Days of the American Republic. A former Cold Warrior, he notably stated, "A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can't be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship."

Richard Montgomery Scammon (July 17, 1915 – April 27, 2001) was an American author, political scientist and elections scholar. He served as Director of the U.S. Bureau of the Census from 1961 to 1965. Afterwards, he worked for decades directing election analysis for NBC News.