College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Encore act

Back for her second Fulbright award, political science's Ardith Maney is returning to Eastern Europe.
When Ardith Maney first started to assist governments in the old Soviet Bloc after the fall of Communism over a decade ago, she, like most other researchers, focused her attention on Central Europe.

The new countries that comprised the former Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary were thought to be closest to realizing a democratic system.

In Maney's case she became involved with an Iowa State College of Agriculture project to help the former Czechoslovakia make the transition to democracy and a market economy in 1992.

Two years later, she won a Fulbright lectureship to teach public administration in a new university in the Czech Republic.

These days, Maney says it's not the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary, but rather nations in the Baltic area that are achieving more success in democracy.

"Looking at institutional reform, the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) have forged ahead of their central European counterparts in some respects in their push toward political institutions," Maney said. "How they have done so will be interesting to share with counterparts in other post-Soviet countries further east."

Maney will get an opportunity to do that this semester while she spends the fall lecturing in public administration at Kaunas University in Kaunas, Lithuania, as a result of her second Fulbright Award.

"Fulbrights are always hard to get," Maney said, "but public administration is an area that is very important and a lot of countries, particularly those in the former Soviet Bloc, are trying to get more information on it.

"I think my expertise and experience is a good fit for the Fulbright program."

At Kaunas, Maney will teach an undergraduate course in comparative public management and give occasional lectures in three graduate-level courses. She will also advise doctoral students, work on curriculum reform with faculty colleagues, and help organize outreach activities with local government officials.

"This will complement work that I have been doing over the past decade in post-socialist countries in central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union," she said.

Since her initial Fulbright, Maney has developed a good understanding of change at the local level in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia. She has also initiated a number of funded programs to enhance civic education and democratization in those countries as well as in the Ukraine. Financial resources to develop these programs have come from funding available in the last decade from U.S. government agencies, foundations, UNESCO, and Iowa businesses.

"I have also collaborated on research and outreach projects with women's groups in Russia and the Republic of Georgia," she said.