[2] He was the Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government at Columbia University, where he was also director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion.
[6] According to the editors of a collection of essays published in honour of Stepan, he was one of the few academics to be a member of both national social science academies.
The award is intended "to honour a prominent scholar engaged in the cross-disciplinary research of which Karl Deutsch was a master".
[10] He authored and edited a number of books, including Arguing Comparative Politics (Oxford University Press, 2001), Crafting State-Nations.
Stepan "challenged the prevailing view in comparative research that saw the military as a force for achieving modernization and national integration."
He also showed that "understanding the military’s political behavior ... required a focus on the broader context of civil-military relations.
"[13] In this book,[14] Stepan "critiqued both pluralist and Marxist approaches for focusing insufficient attention on state elites."