At their annual meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico last month, the Southern Political Science Association named LSU’s Emogene Pliner Distinguished Professor of Political Science James C. Garand the recipient of the 2025 Manning Dauer Award, a prestigious lifetime achievement distinction “presented biennially to a political scientist for exceptional service to the profession.”
Garand began teaching at LSU in 1985, and after 40 years at the university he has earned a reputation as one of the most prominent political science scholars in the nation.
He has published over 90 scholarly articles, served as President of the Southern Political Science Association and the State Politics and Policy section of the American Political Science Association and earned several teaching awards at LSU. The Manning Dauer Award recognizes these outstanding accomplishments and is the crowning achievement of an exceptional career.
“It’s a very humbling award to have received. The list of previous recipients of the Manning Dauer Award reads like a list of political science heroes that I’ve had over the years,” Garand said. “To have joined that list of people is wonderful.”
Garand’s list of accolades is extensive, but when asked what the most gratifying part of his career has been, the decorated professor immediately pointed to his work mentoring students.
“The number one element has been my work as a mentor. When I was an undergraduate and a graduate student, I had faculty members who took me under their wing and helped me, so when I became a professor, I had a pay-it-forward mentality,” he said. “Once I started to direct graduate students and bright undergraduate students, mentoring became an integral part of my work as a professor. It’s a thrill. I get to hang out with bright 20-somethings whenever I want.”
Garand has mentored 35 students who have gone on to hold faculty positions at colleges and universities across the country, including top institutions like Notre Dame, Michigan and Yale. He even has an award named after him: last fall, the Southern Political Science Association created the James C. Garand Outstanding Mentor Award, which “is intended to recognize outstanding mentors in political science.”
As extensive as Garand’s work as a mentor has been, equally noteworthy is his career as a scholar. In addition to serving in leadership roles in several well-respected scholarly journals, Garand’s research interests have followed a fascinating trajectory, making him one of the most dynamic scholars in the field.
“I started off, when I was working as a Ph.D. student, doing work in state politics. My dissertation had to do with the exciting topic of budgeting in the American states. If anyone’s looking to fall asleep, I’m happy to share a copy of my dissertation,” he joked.
Though Garand has published a great deal of research on state politics, he noted that as he has progressed as a scholar, his research interests have diversified.

“Over a period of time, I took advantage of the fact that there’s no one placing a limit on the kind of work that I did,” Garand said. “So I’ve tried to tackle research questions that are of interest to me, and I’ve moved all over the place in terms of my research.”
Over the past 20 years, Garand’s scholarly work has ranged from race and finance to gender and parenting to federal antipsychotic regulations. His most cited paper is titled, “Explaining Voter Turnout in Latin America, 1980-2000.”
While recognizing that his research interests might seem eclectic, Garand thinks studying such a wide variety of topics has made his career more interesting.
“A lot of my inspiration has come from students I’ve worked with, who come to me and say, ‘I’m interested in topic X’ and I say, ‘oh, let’s try to do a project on that,’” he said. But for Garand, that’s all part of the fun. “It’s been very exciting to me that I’m not limited in the kind of work that I can do.”