Peter J. Bergerson, Ph.D.

Peter J. Bergerson Day

1985-05-15

Designated by the City Council and Mayor of Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

Canadian Faculty Enrichment Grant

United States-Canada Public Administration: A Comparative Analysis

National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations

James J. Malone Fellowship

1996

University of Wisconsin

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship

Diffusion of Public Policy

1983

Saint Louis University

Ph.D.

Political Science

1982

2020 United States Presidential Election

American Center Hanoi Lecture  U.S. Embassy and Consulate in Vietnam

Florida Senate Race: If This Campaign Had Been a Prize Fight—They Would Have Stopped It

Peter Bergerson

2018

Marco Rubio’s decision to run for the presidency and initially forgo reelection to the Senate led to Florida being seen as one of five states where Democrats had a solid opportunity and could ultimate regain control of the Senate. Rubio continuously expressed his resolve to leave politics at the end of his Senate term. The Republican Senate leadership, though, was keen on keeping the Florida Senate seat and believed Rubio was their strongest contender and he acquiesced. Democrats nominated a moderate congressman, Patrick Murphy, over a progressive one, Alan Grayson. Following Florida’s August primary election, political analysts handicapped this election as a genuine “toss-up.” But Rubio quickly and clearly outpaced Murphy to the point where Democrats pulled out resources prior to Rubio’s convincing reelection victory.

View more

Book Chapter: Florida’s Bellwether Congressional District 13 Race: The Death of Local Politics

Peter J. Bergerson

2015

The 2014 midterm congressional elections provided a view of the attitude of American voters in the sixth year of Barack Obama’s presidency. This book provides insight about the formative aspects of the 2014 campaign season as well as in depth coverage of key races for Congress. The first section has four chapters that cover the substance of topics that impacted this campaign cycle: the popularity and productivity of the 113th Congress, voter suppression laws passed in many states, the role of Super PACs and independent expenditures in the campaigns, and the use of social media by members of Congress running for reelection. Case studies follow the path of ten House and seven Senate races from inception to election postmortem. The chapters are narrative and provide analysis of an array of interesting and diverse contests from throughout the country. The authors provide succinct and highly readable chapters meant to illustrate the distinctive nature of the campaigns they are examining. Individual campaigns and elections are shown “up close” and be ready to compare and contrast because of the common format employed throughout the book. Taken together, the chapters reveal that the roads to Congress, while similar in so many ways, each follow a unique route to Capitol Hill.

View more

The President as a Public Policy Change Agent: The Social Security Initiative

Peter J. Bergerson

2005

The research tradition of public administration has long been devoted to the investigation of the origins, development, adoption and implementation of public policy. Scholars have developed stages or processes, which outline a sequential pattern of actions and decisions that can be distinguished and analyzed though observation. This paper focuses on the policy adoption stage of the policy process. Specifically, the paper examines the role of the President of the United States as a change agent in his efforts to initiate legislative changes in the nation’s retirement income program.

View more