Michael K. Le Roy is a professor of Political Science and Executive Vice President and Dean of the Faculty at Whitworth University in Washington state. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science at Vanderbilt University, and he was a Fulbright scholar at Gothenburg University in Sweden. In addition to his extensive research and travel in Europe and Latin America, Professor Le Roy has studied and traveled in Central and South America. His research on civil society and social capital has been published in Comparative Politics. Michael Le Roy returned to Whitworth in fall 2002 from Wheaton College, in Illinois, where he served as chair of the department of political science. After teaching… three years for the Political Science department, Le Roy accepted the position as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty. Le Roy still teaches for the Political Science department and continues as a team member for the Central America Study-Service Program. His research on civil society, xenophobia, and the European Union has been published in the journal, COMPARATIVE POLITICS. He is also the author of COMPARATIVE POLITICS: AN INTRODUCTION (4th Edition), and RESEARCH METHODS IN POLITICAL SCIENCE (7th Edition). Le Roy won Wheaton College's faculty achievement award for excellence in teaching in 1998 and a similar award from the American Political Science Association's honor society, Pi Sigma Alpha, in 1999.