The Watergate Scandal grabbed the attention of a nation and a particular undergraduate

by Kami L. Rice

If there had been no burglary at the Watergate office complex in 1972, Richard “Rick” Waterman, professor of political science at UK, might never have entered the field of political science. “I was fascinated by the whole Watergate investigation,” he said. “That really got me interested in politics.”

At the time, Waterman was an undergraduate at Rhode Island College with a major in history, but with the intrigue of Watergate, he added a minor in political science. “It was like a soap opera, like a drama,” said Waterman. “Every day new revelations would come out. Richard Nixon was like a Shakespearean character.”

The fascinating drama of it all caused him to pay more attention to the political world. In order to follow the scandal’s twists and turns, he made an effort to learn how things in Washington work. “I was reading everything I could get my hands on,” Waterman noted. All that learning was fun, prompting him to realize he might really enjoy studying these things more closely.

Though Watergate was the launching point for some of his current research interests, Waterman didn’t immediately pursue those interests in formal ways. Instead, he earned a Master of Education in history, taught English as a second language as a Peace Corps volunteer in what was then Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), and worked for a while as a sixth grade teacher. He returned to academia to earn a master’s degree and doctorate in political science from the University of Houston.

“I always wanted to do research,” he said. While Waterman didn’t consider what the academic job market would be like when his degrees were complete, he knew at a minimum that it was something he found enjoyable and fulfilling.

His decision to pursue political science as a career has proven fruitful – from his extensive publishing credits, to his testimony before the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Public Works and the Environment and his recent receipt of a National Science Foundation grant – Waterman still enjoys digging deep into his research, and he’s still having fun.

With current research interests in the presidency, the courts and the bureaucracy, the courts are the primary focus of Waterman’s NSF grant work. The award and the funding were received in the fall of 2007, but the project, which considers how statutes and laws affect judicial decision-making, is still in progress, with more papers and a book in the works.

The importance of this research is that “it is showing a much more dynamic way that judges decide cases than had been determined before,” Waterman explained. “It should create an entirely new theory on how judges decide cases.” While people had looked at the issue previously, Waterman said that no one else had examined it in the way he and his co-researchers have. The early work on the project, which was published in the Journal of Politicsbefore the NSF grant was received, is already being taught in universities as a new theory.

Receiving the highly competitive NSF grant is a major sign of credibility and was critical to speeding up the process of coding the data necessary for this particular research. “Most of my career I haven’t needed grants because I’ve been able to get publicly available data,” Waterman explained.

While the data collection itself was free, taking it from its raw state to the form necessary for analysis was a slow process. The grant allowed Waterman to hire and fully fund two graduate students for a year to do the work. He says that without the grant it probably would have taken four more years just to get the data, making the grant essential to timely research.

As a result of the research, “we now have a better sense of how a judge’s ideology matters in relationship to the laws they interpret,” Waterman explained. The research first looked at federal judges at the appellate court level and then moved on to study the Supreme Court and state courts to see how broadly the results apply.

"We’ve been able to show how ideology, such as a judge’s personal attitudes, and legal factors, like the plain meaning of the law, interact,” Waterman said. “We argue that legal statutes can constrain judicial ideology.” And while his job as a researcher is only to observe the connections, he acknowledges that most people would consider it a good thing that judges’ ideologies are constrained by legal factors. The relevance of this research could be seen in this summer’s confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, which Waterman watched with much interest.

This fall commences Waterman’s ninth year at UK and he appreciates being part of a department that contains so many excellent scholars, giving the university a national reputation in political science. The level of scholarship among faculty also benefits students since their professors are able to bring cutting edge research into the classroom. “We aren’t just teaching a book, we actually know the people who wrote the book,” he added.

Waterman enjoys teaching because “you have to keep learning as well as teaching. You’re constantly seeing new generations of students and learning from them.” Over the years of his academic career he’s seen the political attitudes, interests and motivations of students shift relative to what’s going on culturally. Perhaps these students will find the drama of today’s political culture alluring enough to follow in Waterman’s footsteps.

Nixon photo - Owen Franken/CORBIS

Waterrman in front of Congress - courtesy of Richard Waterrman

Waterrman photo - Shaun Ring