Robert Edwards Lane, APSA President (1970–1971)
Robert E. Lane was one of the preeminent political scientists of the twentieth century, a founder of behavioral research and political psychology. At the time of his death on December 31, 2017 at age 100, he was Eugene Meyer Professor Emeritus at Yale University. Professor Lane taught at Yale for almost 40 years, and continued living and working among his colleagues for the remaining three decades of his life. He died at the Whitney Center in Hamden, Connecticut, where he had lived with his wife Helen since 2003.
AN ACTIVIST YOUTH – AND OLD AGE
Robert Lane was born on August 19, 1917, in Philadelphia. In his autobiographical sketch, The Intellectual Journey of Robert E. Lane, he portrayed himself as “the son of a sometime professor and Executive Director of the Welfare Council in New York City (1933–1943)” and of a mother who was “a progressive teacher and principal of elite private schools.” Thus he was “made sensitive to the Left,” even beyond the impact of the stock market crash, Great Depression, and New Deal of his teen years.
Lane attended private schools, and then Harvard College from 1935 to 1939, where he first made a name for himself as a political activist. As president of the American Student Union, as well as president of its Harvard chapter, he helped to organize the first labor union for busboys and waitresses in the House dining halls. For his pains, Lane was scolded by the Harvard Treasurer “on the grounds,” recalled decades later in “‘The Grand Wake for Harvard Indifference’: How Harvard and Radcliffe Students Aided Young Refugees from the Nazis” by Harvard physicist Gerard Holton, “that the profit made by the dining halls was dedicated to the scholarships of [his] own friends!”
Lane’s activist commitments soon responded to a darker historical moment. Following Kristallnacht in 1938, he and other students organized the Harvard Committee to Aid German Student Refugees. They persuaded President James Bryant Conant to pledge the Harvard administration to match student fundraising for scholarships, and called on other colleges and universities to also sponsor refugees. Politicians, celebrities, and students around the country joined the effort, helped along by a New York Times editorial and a letter, detailed in Gerard Holton’s article, from President Franklin Roosevelt to Robert Lane expressing his appreciation and hope that “this program . . .will be taken up by other institutions throughout the country.” It was “a national grassroots movement . . .[that] helped hundreds of persecuted Central European students find refuge and education at colleges and universities across the United States. . . . The humanitarian effort that emanated from Harvard highlights a tectonic change among many students at the time—from ivory-tower existence to social activism.” Lane spent most of his final semester chairing the Intercollegiate Committee to Aid Student Refugees; at risk of flunking out, “he asked a Cambridge tutoring agency for a contribution in kind to the refugee committee. ‘They agreed and saw me through my exams’.” He graduated with a BS in 1939, on schedule. Six decades later, Robert Putnam recalled Lane’s pride in a linden tree planted in Harvard Yard to commemorate the drive to bring European refugees to American universities (Lane asked Putnam and Hochschild to check to see if snowplows had damaged the tree in Boston’s epic winter of 2015).
After graduation, Lane turned from student activism to national defense, joining the US Army Air Force from 1942 to 1946. He served at an officer’s training school, rising to the rank of captain. He completed an MPA at Harvard in 1946 and a PhD in economics and political science in 1950. After joining the Yale faculty, he remained politically active. He joined Helen Lane in the final stages of her march in the civil rights protest in Selma, Alabama, and spoke out, detailed in his autobiographical A Timid Rebel in the Promised Land: The Activist Career of Robert E. Lane, on behalf of retaining ROTC on the Yale campus “on the grounds that all countries needed armies, arguing how much better it would have been if one of our students had been in Lt. Calley’s place.” He skirmished with the Polish government and brought potentially controversial documents out of the USSR.
Even in retirement at the Whitney Center, Lane persisted in being “sensitive to the Left,” by founding the National Senior Conservation Corps (Gray is Green), to promote ecologically beneficial practices at dozens of retirement communities across the country. Gray is Green, according to their website, is an “online gathering of older adult Americans aspiring to create a green legacy for the future.” As Lane’s former student Fred Greenstein put it several years ago, quoted in The Politic’s “Founding Fathers: From the Classroom to the Retirement Home: A Look at Three of Yale’s Foremost Political Scientists,” “Lane has aged into his nineties acting very much the same as he did in his fifties. He’s kind of like the Hollywood version of a tireless professor.”
AN ACADEMIC CAREER
Although not unrelated, it is Robert Lane’s scholarship more than his activism for which he will be chiefly remembered. Lane came to Yale as an instructor in 1948, became an assistant professor in 1951, was tenured as an associate professor in 1957, became a professor in 1962, and was appointed the Eugene Mayer Professor in 1969. He chaired the Political Science Department from 1967 through 1970, and retired in 1984.
As he recalled in his autobiography, Lane’s graduate study turned him from “the arid, math-centered study of economics” and toward “the ways psychologists went about their work.” Several intellectual strands came together to shape the ways in which Lane melded psychology with political science (and eventually, with economics). First, leading political scientists in the 1950s were moving away from the theoretical study of laws and constitutions into more empirical analyses of how politics actually transpired in government institutions, politicians’ practices, and individuals’ behaviors. Second, Lane and others began paying attention to politics from the ground up—insisting on the importance of analyzing how ordinary people came to endorse democracy, fascism, equality, or hierarchy. Both strands of research were impelled by the shocks of World War II and the Cold War; people who had served in the 1940s military forces or marched in Montgomery, Alabama realized in their core just how important, and volatile, political activity and structures could be. Finally, the growth of computing capacity, survey research, and new statistical techniques made possible the behavioral revolution, which opened new vistas to scholars. As a result, Yale’s young, ambitious political scientists were able to build, as recalled by Margaret Levi, professor at Stanford University, “the first modern department of political science, a department that asked major substantive questions while using the best social science techniques available at the time.”
Lane was at the forefront of the behavioral revolution; “during that period, we were outstanding, because we were first in accepting the behavioral science,” he reflected six decades later for Eric Stern. He was, in fact, arguably more faithful to the tenets of behavioralism—the empirical study of political beliefs and behaviors of individuals and groups—than any of his equally extraordinary peers such as Robert Dahl, Charles Lindblom, Herbert Kaufman, Juan Linz, Joseph LaPalombara, David Apter, and others. All of them devoted a larger portion of their long careers to institutional, historical, theoretical, or normative analyses; despite occasional digressions, Lane always returned to the study of how people do politics. As Ian Shapiro put it, “Lane was the real father of the behavioral turn [at Yale]; . . . he was relentlessly behavioral in his approach and orientation.”
That is not to say that Lane’s intellectual interests were fixed; they ranged widely within the arena of empirical analysis of individuals’ political views and actions. In retrospect, he described his research trajectory as seeking answers to seven questions, in rough chronological order. Almost every question corresponds to a major book and series of articles, suggested here by the parenthetical insertions:
• How do businessmen adapt to government regulation, in comparison to laborers adapting to working conditions? (The Regulation of Businessmen, Yale University Press, 1954);
• Why do people get involved in politics, and why is American political apathy so stark? (Political Life: Why People Get Involved in Politics, Free Press, 1959);
• Why do people choose the political ideologies they do; how can we find explanations beyond their own rationalizations? (Political Ideology: Why the American Common Man Believes What He Does, Free Press; 1962; Political Thinking and Consciousness, Markham, 1969)
• Why doesn’t the philosophy of science apply to all scholarly inquiries, for example, literature? (answer: it does—The Liberties of Wit: Humanism, Criticism, and the Civic Mind, Yale Press, 1970).
• Given that the people society produces are the most important of all social products, what is the effect on human personality of major institutions, such as the market? (The Market Experience, Cambridge University Press, 1991);
• Does the market actually maximize ‘utility’ or happiness, as is claimed in justification for laissez-faire policies of production and resource allocation? (The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, Yale University Press, 2001); and
• How will the transition from affluent consumerism to the age of climate change affect our institutions, values, and quality of life? (Worlds in Transition: From the Affluent Society to the Age of Climate Change?, not published).
Lane began, in short, with a focus on the intersection of economics and politics, moved for much of his career to the intersection of psychology and politics, and culminated with a focus on the intersection of economics and psychology.
Without attempting to summarize or comment on his large corpus of work, let me reflect on two of Lane’s most distinctive and important books, Political Ideology and The Market Experience. Political Ideology was deceptively simple; Lane merely asked fifteen white male residents of a middle-income apartment building to talk with him about their lives, activities, hopes, fears, and beliefs. They did, to the extent of 3,750 pages of transcriptions. Lane fashioned this mundane raw material into a lasting work of art. The findings are nuanced and complex rather than dramatic or stark, since most respondents lacked the sort of ideology that political scientists obsess over. They were largely tolerant of others’ views and of diversity in opinions mainly because political differences didn’t much matter to them and they didn’t much engage in politics. They did not see people as equal in any deep way, but they did value equality of opportunity. They generally saw the national government as vaguely benign and responsive, and many knew how to pull levers of power in their local communities. Their more explicitly political views were fragmentary, “morselized,” closely tied to personal or family circumstances, pragmatic, and occasionally prejudiced or conspiratorial. Perhaps what is most interesting about Lane’s fifteen men is that they implicitly refute many of the concerns expressed by social and political theorists in the unsettled 1950s and 1960s – they were not alienated, authoritarian, anxious, or dehumanized by urban isolation or soulless factories. “Their ideology is one of rather complacent acceptance of the existing state of things,” as reviewer Jan Van Til summarizes it in a 1964 Social Forces issue, and thus they provide a ballast for democratic governance as they go about their daily lives.
The substantive conservatism reported in Political Ideology contrasts fascinatingly with its methodological innovation. Most broadly, the book is a foundational text for what was then being invented as the field of political psychology. Lane used the traditional concept of personality but “he was well aware of contemporary developments in psychology, especially the anti-trait movement and the emergence of situationism. He had an uncanny ability to synthesize the old and the new, suggesting an exam question that Shanto Iyengar recalls as, ‘What do Marx, Manheim, and Merton, for example, have to say that is relevant to the situational approach [in social psychology], and how does that approach help us understand the sociology of knowledge?’
Deborah Schildkraut, professor at Tufts University, makes clear the epistemological impact of Lane’s patient and focused attention to the not-very-coherent, not-very-politicized views of his subjects:
What I took from it most was the importance of making sure that as the field was becoming more and more quantitative, we need to continue to include research that allows people to use their own words to express their views on political matters. Politics is very complicated and there’s no reason why we should expect people to have firm, fully-formed, consistent views on the issues of the day. Their lack in that regard is not necessarily a sign of incompetence. Only by hearing people grapple with the issues does it become clear that people can be deeply thoughtful yet still have trouble knowing where they stand. I suspect that many scholars agree with this view, yet we still see so much public opinion and political psychology research focus exclusively on quantitative analysis. We need that, of course, but we also need to welcome and encourage alternatives.
Katherine Cramer, professor at University of Wisconsin–Madison, was similarly inspired:
Encountering Political Ideology alongside Philip Converse’s classic essay on the topic made me believe it was legitimate to study how people understand and interpret politics. From Political Ideology, I learned that when you listen and observe the way people connect considerations for themselves, you often do not see people being tricked or fooled. Instead, you see people making associations that make sense given the perspectives through which they see the world.
Political Ideology exemplified Lane’s ability to conceptualize people as social beings with political aspects to their lives. He revealed the complexity of people, and yet demonstrated how possible it is to directly encounter that messiness and still make sense of it in a way that contributes to the science of politics.
Although it also reveals Lane’s signature humanism, commitment to the careful sifting of evidence, and embracing of the complexity of social interactions, The Market Experience is very different substantively and methodologically from Political Ideology. Instead of the world within a grain of sand, it is sprawling and expansive, aiming to address most of Western civilization and most of the past few centuries. Instead of relying on newly created evidence, it is an extended literature review, with an author index of well over 1,000 entries. Instead of conveying an essentially conservative message, it is deeply and quietly radical.
Lane, the erstwhile political activist and author of the rather comforting Political Ideology, was “blindsided in the 1960s by the counterculture;” he spent the next twenty-five years coming to grips with it. The result was a book that reaches past arguments between conservative or libertarian defenses of market freedoms and incentives, versus progressive or countercultural challenges to market inequality and materialism. He cares little whether markets’ success outweighs their failures by conventional measures; his message is that our criteria for judging markets are wrong. We should in fact evaluate markets’ on the counterculturalists’ (not well articulated) terms: do markets enhance life satisfaction and human development through working, creating, interacting, and desiring?
Lane did not go completely to the other side; no 1960s hippy would agree that compared with “relations with others,” work is “the major source of adult development.” Nonetheless, The Market Experience insists that the appropriate grounds for judging the world’s dominant economic system are its impact on self-esteem, the capacity for personal growth and creativity, and interpersonal connections.
These countercultural convictions are rigorously—ruthlessly—mapped onto the results of hundreds of psychological experiments, surveys, case studies, social theories, and any other sort of evidence that Lane can find. (After retirement, he pleaded with Yale’s provost to be able to keep his office and the adjoining one for his 5,000 books and collections of 20 journals so that he could complete this project.) The results are, as one came to expect from him, nuanced and complicated. Lane argues for cognitive complexity rather than rationality as a measure of human achievement; he finds markets good at producing self-attributions but bad at producing happiness; markets are surprisingly effective at making work meaningful (shades of Political Ideology) but surprisingly ineffective at turning money into a powerful incentive to action. Politics plays almost no role in The Market Experience; having helped to invent political psychology, Lane mostly eschewed it in his final opus.
ROBERT LANE’S INTELLECTUAL IMPACT
Taking a leaf from his own research methods, we can evaluate Lane’s impact through both purportedly objective measures and qualitative evaluations. In addition to his endowed chair, presidency of APSA, and chairmanship of what was then the best political science department in the United States, Lane was a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, president of the International Society of Political Psychology and of the Policy Studies Organization, and a visiting scholar at many universities. His books were translated into seven languages; he served on multiple APSA committees; he received many grants, fellowships, awards, and other honors. APSA’s Political Psychology section created the Robert E. Lane Book Award in 1999 for the best book in the field in a given year; in some sort of postmodern irony, Lane won the award in 2001 for The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies.
Lane loved to teach. “It’s a marvelous life. If you’re interested in ideas, you have time to elicit from students the best that they have. I can’t see how anyone would want to live any other way,” Lane said in a 2014 feature for Yale News. So students’ views may be an even better measure of his impact than are honors and titles. James Scott, a colleague at Yale, pictures Lane “patiently elaborating the intellectual background of ‘behaviorism’ as a means of establishing political ‘acts’ as a way of penetrating the ethical trappings and obfuscations designed to disguise them. A consistent thread through all his work is the insistence on evidence, broadly considered, and on listening carefully to all political actors as the only way to a more complete understanding of political life.” Lane was, according to Scott, “the most widely read and cosmopolitan of his colleagues.”
David Sears points to different lessons. Having just completed his first year as a psychology graduate student, he interpreted his task of reviewing transcripts of interviews for Political Ideology as requiring computation of chi-square tests to explain differences among respondents. But Lane “kept gently urging me to approach the material from a more qualitative perspective. That was a lesson for me. Just because I had a hammer. . . .” Sears also noted Lane’s “unique perspective on public opinion because of his background in political theory.” That knowledge facilitated his examination of “the large questions always posed by trying to force unruly citizens into a democracy,” and gave Political Ideology its profound depth in the study of public opinion.
Lane was an attentive and careful mentor as well as teacher. He “listened to his students as intently and respectfully as he listened to subjects of his research,” in Scott’s words. He helped the young Robert Putnam do something highly unusual in the 1960s: publish a seminar paper in the APSR. He encouraged Putnam to submit the paper, counseled him to replicate the original analysis, edited the text, and reminded Putnam on one draft that “Tocqueville has a ‘c’ in it.” Joel Aberbach recalls a discussion with Lane about an early draft of part of his dissertation, in which Lane indicated that he did not understand some of the argument. This was done in a manner that suggested some of the fault lay with the reader rather than the confused writer. All of the difficulty, of course, was grounded in the muddled thinking of the dissertation writer, but Aberbach left the room confident that he could fix it rather than feeling deeply discouraged. Shanto Iyengar “arrived in New Haven as a postdoc with no standing whatsoever; Bob was the world’s leading scholar of political psychology. Nevertheless, Bob went out of his way to counsel me on how best to navigate my postdoctoral fellowship. We spent hours together discussing how I might apply research in social psychology to the study of mass politics. I still have the note he sent me the day after my job talk [at Yale]; Bob knew this was a pivotal moment for me and, as usual, sought to provide much-needed reassurance and support.” Sears sums up Lane’s impact on his students: “I learned far more from him than any formal curriculum could have taught. And much of it was simply watching him and listening to him.”
FINAL REFLECTIONS – HIS AND OURS
Lane spent much of his last decade ruminating about his life—what he felt best about and what he wished he had done differently—particularly in the years after Helen died at age 94. He subjected his past to a harsh light of critical scrutiny, wanting to go the grave having come fully to terms with it.
Professionally, Lane felt best about his role, along with Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom, in moving the nascent political science discipline away from armchair theoretical speculation and lawyer-like institutional analysis. He was also proud of having fought a long and ultimately victorious battle to free Yale’s political science department from the excessive influence of the law school. Lane’s successful fight for an appointment during Kingman Brewster’s presidency, achieved by blocking a law professor’s participation in the social science appointments committee (not permitted under Yale’s bylaws), was a watershed moment after which the department’s integrity and independence were secure.
In his final reflections, however, Lane was most proud of things that had little to do with academic scholarship, particularly his sustained efforts to bring European refugee students to the United States in the late 1930s. He referred to himself as a “timid rebel,” but he took real risks in those years for which he could have paid a substantial professional price.
Lane’s intellectual descendants honor him for that and other moral and political actions, but we remember him most for his scholarship and teaching. His legacy includes a commitment to evidence-based social science, resistance to reducing politics to economics, essential contributions to the new field of political psychology, and early work in what would eventually become the field of behavioral economics. He taught us about the nature and dynamics of political ideology, and the sources of—and impediments to realizing—human happiness. Almost single-handedly, he developed, nurtured, and sustained the epistemology and methodology of intensive, structured interviews with “the common man [sic]”—ensuring that individuals’ views be treated with dignity, intellectual seriousness, and normative value. With all of his methodological innovations and grand theoretical frameworks, he remained problem-driven to his intellectual core. And, as Iyengar sums up, “Bob Lane was not only a giant of a scholar, whose insights into the frailty of ordinary citizens’ understanding of the political world hold up even today, he was also the epitome of human decency.”
—Jennifer Hochschild, Harvard University
With contributions from:
—Joel Aberbach, University of California, Los Angeles
—Shanto Iyengar, Stanford University
—Ian Shapiro, Yale University
Berenice A. Carroll
Berenice A. Carroll, Professor Emerita of Political Science at Purdue University and the University of Illinois, died on Thursday, May 10, 2018, in Lafayette, Indiana. Berenice was an outstanding scholar and activist who worked for world peace and stood in support of women, people of color, workers, and victims of injustice everywhere.
Born on December 14, 1932, in New York, she did her undergraduate work at Queens College in New York and earned her doctorate from Brown University in 1960. Berenice was a professor of political science for 20 years at Purdue University from 1990 to 2010. She also served as the director of the Women’s Studies program at Purdue from 1990 to 2000. Prior to that, Carroll served as the director of Women’s Studies at the Universityof Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and the University of Maryland at College Park,
Berenice Carroll has left an indelible presence in peace research, women’s studies, academic associations, and political activism in peace and women’s movements. She was a role model, mentor, and supporter of countless students, colleagues, other activists, and friends.
Berenice Carroll grew up in the aftermath of World War II, the Holocaust, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the threat of nuclear war during the Cold War period. She was moved to action very early in life by volunteering to work on a kibbutz in Israel in the early 1950s. As a young scholar, she saw the necessity of connecting research and teaching to build a peaceful world. Increasingly, she saw the interconnections between patriarchy and the problems of war and social injustice.
Design for Total War: Arms and Economics in the Third Reich, her first book, prefigures her career as a peace researcher. It reviews the concept of total war as envisioned by the Nazi regime and the development in Germany of what later would be called the military-industrial complex. Part of the research was done in Germany, as a Fulbright scholar, relatively soon after the war. Her subsequent peace research publications explored how wars end, the impacts of war, the power of peace and justice movements, and the connections between feminist theory and peace.
As a student and young academic, Berenice Carroll realized that the role of women was marginalized in history and in academia. With the rise of the women’s movement, she embarked on studies of the centrality of women as political theorists and activists. She published studies on Christine de Pizan, Mary Beard, Virginia Woolf, and, later, Jane Addams. Her most important work on women included Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays; Women’s Political and Social Thought: An Anthology; and a special issue of the Women’s Studies International Forum titled “In a Great Company of Women,” a collection of essays on women throughout the world who engaged in nonviolent direct action.
Her research and publications influenced the growing fields of peace and women’s studies. She also became a force in the transformation of professional associations of political scientists, historians, and peace researchers. She played a leading role in building a women’s caucus in both APSA and the American Historical Association. She went on to become the president of the National Women’s Studies Association.
Along with international scholar/activists, she built the International Peace Research Association and the Consortium on Peace Research, Education, and Development (COPRED), which became the Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA). She and Clint Fink (her second husband and partner of 45 years) chaired COPRED. In addition, she coedited with Clint Fink Peace and Change: A Journal of Peace Research. She also served as a founding faculty member of Purdue University’s Committee on Peace Studies.
Throughout her academic career, Berenice put forward ways to link theory and practice, or as a 2007 celebration of her work was titled, “Pen and Protest.” From her early activism against the spread of nuclear weapons as a SANE (National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) activist, to protest against wars in Vietnam, Central America, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, she was always on the front lines in support of peace and justice.
Her activism in support of women equaled her activism against war. She played a significant role in establishing a women’s residential crisis center in Urbana, Illinois, in the 1970s. She was also a member of the Grassroots Group of Second-Class Citizens who chained themselves to the brass railing outside the Illinois Senate, which began a month-long series of demonstrations and civil disobedience protesting the Illinois state legislature’s refusal to endorse the Equal Rights Amendment in June 1982.
In her writing and activism, Berenice Carroll was inspired by women peace activists such as Jane Addams. In 2007, she and Clint Fink edited and republished Addams’s classic essay, “Newer Ideals of Peace,” originally published in 1907. They wrote a compelling introduction that captured the connections between Addams’s theoretical and practical work for peace and justice.
As Carroll and Fink indicate, Addams postulated that the tasks of peace activists must go beyond just stopping war. According to Addams, achieving what peace researchers later called “negative peace,” ending wars, must be coupled with “positive peace.” Positive peace includes transformations of the societies that engaged in warfare. These transformations must include the end of hierarchies of all kinds, including patriarchy, the criminal justice system, and systems of domination and subordination at the workplace. In sum, advocating for social and economic justice was needed along with demanding an end to shooting wars. This summary of Addams’s theory and practice captures the engaged life of Berenice Carroll.
Berenice Carroll will be missed by her activist comrades, her colleagues, her students, and her loving family and friends.
—Harry Targ, Purdue University
Karen Dawisha
Karen Dawisha, Walter Havighurst Professor Emerita of Political Science at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, passed away on April 11, 2018, after a long battle with cancer. A life-long student of Soviet and Russian politics, history, and culture, she leaves behind an intellectual legacy that will continue to influence and inspire future generations of social scientists.
Born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on December 2, 1949, Karen Dawisha debuted as a scholar in 1972 when she published her first article. Her second appeared three years later. These early texts are notable because they do not contain a single reference to the writings of a female Western academic. Clearly, the young American scholar who was working on her dissertation in the United Kingdom was entering a field from which women were mostly absent. In subsequent years the field would change–at least in part because Karen Dawisha established for herself the reputation of an insightful expert on Soviet politics and a widely admired political scientist and thus became a role model for the cohorts of female graduate students whose careers began in the 1980s and the 1990s.
Her first two essays also make it easy to understand what made Dawisha’s success possible. They are written in a clear, jargon-free language; they offer arguments grounded in masterfully crafted analytical frameworks; their central messages are articulated in a lucid and compelling manner. The articles also reveal the sheer scope and depth of the young author’s knowledge: the first one, on “The Roles of Ideology in the Decision-Making of the Soviet Union” (published in International Relations), contains references to Barrington Moore, C. Wright Mills, Daniel Bell, and Talcott Parsons, as well as philosophical digressions on Karl Marx. The second one, on “Soviet Cultural Relations with Iraq, Syria and Egypt, 1955–1970” (published in Soviet Studies), contains references to James Rosenau, K.J.Holsti, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Anastas Mikoyan, as well as quantitative analysis of a painstakingly compiled data set. Even at this early stage of her career, Dawisha demonstrated that she was fully capable of pursuing versatile projects with methodological rigor and analytical dexterity.
Over the next four decades Karen Dawisha made key contributions to at least four areas of substantive knowledge about the Soviet and post-Soviet political universes.
The first one is Soviet domestic politics. In her debut article she offers a subtle analysis of the impact of Marxism-Leninism on the decision-making procedures and the policy choices institutionalized by Soviet political elites. Dawisha’s article also places a special emphasis on how the internal contradictions within the reigning ideology over time generate markedly different forms of governmental action. In the 1980s she continued these explorations and published insightful studies of the organizational evolution of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the role of state structures in Soviet-type regimes, and the distinct characteristics of Soviet bureaucratic politics.
Secondly, Karen Dawisha was well-known as a perspicacious observer of Soviet foreign policy. Her dissertation–which she defended in 1975 at the London School of Economics before a committee that included academic luminaries such as Leonard Schapiro and Humphrey Trevelyan–was entitled “Soviet Foreign Policy toward Iraq, Syria and Egypt.” Over the next dozen years, it was precisely to the global entanglements of the Soviet Union that she devoted the bulk of her scholarship. Fairly quickly she became the only Western expert who could competently discuss Soviet foreign policy both in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe (her first book, which came out in 1979, is entitled Soviet Policy Towards Egypt; her second book, published five years later, is entitled The Kremlin and the Prague Spring). And, as the decade progressed, she was among the few academics who instantly recognized the significance of Gorbachev’s reforms: her explorations of the effect of perestroika on Marxist regimes in Eastern Europe and the impact of the East European satellites’ growing restlessness culminated in the publication of one of her most widely read and admired monographs, Eastern Europe, Gorbachev and Reform: The Great Challenge.
After the collapse of communism, Dawisha’s attention shifted to postcommunist transformations. The four-volume series on politics in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union she edited with Bruce Parrott for Cambridge University Press remains one of the most important contributions to the literature about the tumultuous 1990s. In addition, Karen Dawisha published theoretical essays on the notion of democratic consolidation and the impact of electoral politics on divided societies.
Finally, over the last two decades Karen Dawisha’s scholarship turned toward domestic politics in postcommunist Russia, and more specifically the essential characteristics of Putin’s regime. The most important product of her scholarly effort in that regard is the brilliant and much-discussed Putin’s Kleptocracy. Undeniably, this masterpiece expanded the universe of facts available to scholars who study Russia, offered a coherent analytical account of the massive shifts that reshaped institutional and political landscapes in the 1990s, and inspired novel ways of thinking about the linkages between money and power in authoritarian regimes.
Beyond scholarly research, arguably Karen Dawisha’s most remarkable intellectual achievement was that after the collapse of the Soviet Union she was able to reinvent herself as a sharp observer of postcommunist politics. At first glance, such a transition might appear to be natural. In fact, it is not: few of those who began their careers studying Soviet-type politics were subsequently able to make innovative contributions to the literature on postcommunism. Some remained trapped in ideological polemics featuring Russia as a place where promising experiments are constantly undermined by a nefarious West (with the IMF, the World Bank, and “neo-liberal reformers” cast in the role of villains previously assigned to NATO and American imperialism). Others never grasped the nature of the transformative dynamics that propelled the massive changes of the 1990s and could not separate the analytically important wheat from the sensationalist chaff. Still others chose to focus on current events ensuring that their opinions and conclusions were quickly superseded by subsequent developments. In sum, the number of former Sovietologists who were able to write important articles and books on postcommunist Russia is intriguingly small.
Karen Dawisha was one of these Sovietologists. Her ability to maintain her scholarly presence in a field of study that was increasingly populated by the “young lions and lionesses” of the 1990s and 2000s (recent PhDs who studied postcommunism without ever having done research on communism) should be attributed to her unique talent for detecting and explaining the sometimes bewildering combinations of ruptures and continuities that transpired in the former Soviet world. She was one of the few scholars who could amalgamate analytical accounts of what happened before and after 1991 into compelling interpretative narratives. But there are at least two other reasons why Karen Dawisha gained recognition as an astute observer of postcommunist politics.
The first one is her open-mindedness as a scholar and intellectual. Her research agenda was never molded by an unwavering commitment to a particular ideology, research program, or methodology. She never sought to impose preconceived notions on complex realities and seemed always aware of the fact that interpretative frameworks that have proven to be helpful in the past may have become inadequate. Unlike many of her fellow Sovietologists, Dawisha appeared ready to recognize the obsoleteness of habitually deployed interpretative strategies and to accept the fact that new political realities must be approached from new analytical vantage points.
The other reason why Karen Dawisha was able to metamorphose successfully from a Sovietologist into an expert on postcommunism is her self-restraint (it should be pointed out that this is a scholarly virtue which, alas, only tenured professors can afford; Dawisha was granted tenure in 1976 at the University of Southampton, and became a full professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1985). Amidst the convulsions of the 1990s it was expected that it would be precisely those who claimed to understand the politics of Soviet-type regimes that would serve as reliable explainers of postcommunist transformations. And many did try to play that role: they rapidly published commentaries, analyses, and opinions both in scholarly journals and collections of essays, and in mass media outlets. But that is not how Karen Dawisha chose to behave. Here is an interesting fact about her scholarship: in the 1980s, Dawisha published 30 articles and book chapters; in the 1990s–only 11, and of those, four were on the Soviet era, not the post-Soviet era. Behind these numbers stands the realization that what is clearly visible and thus easy to discuss may also be analytically unimportant and politically inconsequential–and that, to quote Shakespeare, “things growing are not ripe until their season” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2, Scene 2, line 124). That is why efforts to render postcommunism intelligible might easily go astray: interpretative paradigms that invoked instantly recognizable notions such as “neoliberal reforms,” “the arrival of capitalism,” “transition to democracy,” “the rise of electoral politics, political parties, and parliamentarism,” “center-periphery relations,” or “the legacies of the past” might indeed help us make sense of what is happening. At the same time, the legibility of the newly emerging contexts is purchased at a very high price: forsaking true understanding. It seems, therefore, that sometimes the intellectually appropriate thing to do is to resist the temptation to declare what is happening before our eyes a confirmation of a pet theory, sit back, follow events, and think. While Dawisha remained active in the 1990s–as the previously-mentioned Cambridge University Press series attests–she generally refrained from entering the raging debates du jour. When she did begin to publish more ambitious scholarly texts–on the divisive impact of multiparty elections, on the concept of democratic consolidation, and, especially, on Putin–she had strikingly original things to say.
Here, then, are the enduring characteristics of Karen Dawisha’s scholarship: a deep knowledge of a particular region admixed with an alertness of the mind that made it possible for her to see that this region is changing in unpredicted and unpredictable ways; mastery of currently available analytical toolkits combined with the clear understanding that sometimes the overreliance on such toolkits is a sign of intellectual laziness; and intellectual curiosity and courage tampered by analytical rigor. It is precisely this panoply of intellectual virtues and scholarly skills that enabled Dawisha to gain recognition as one of her generation’s most outstanding political scientists.
From 2000 until her retirement in 2016, Karen Dawisha assumed yet another role: institution-builder. She became the founding Director of Miami University of Ohio’s Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies, which was established with the help of a generous gift from distinguished Miami professor of English and nationally recognized author Walter Havighurst (1901–1994). Under her leadership, the Center became one of the most exciting new academic projects devoted to the study of the former “second world.” Among the reasons for this success are three initiatives that Karen Dawisha conceived, designed, and institutionalized: the Havighurst Fellowships (two-year post-doctoral fellowships that allow young scholars to create and teach classes directly related to their area of expertise); the annual Young Researchers’ Conference (which brings together ABDs, recent PhDs, and assistant professors from North America, Europe, and the former Soviet Union with Havighurst faculty and senior keynote speakers for a three-day event that combines public lectures with intensive panel discussions); and the Havighurst lecture, held in the Center’s hometown of Oxford, OH and delivered by a leading figure from Russia, Eastern Europe, or the United States who has made an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the region of former Soviet domination. It is solely due to Karen Dawisha’s leadership that the Havighurst Center has by now become one of the most exciting and talked-about academic destinations for those who study the Russian empire, communism, and postcommunism. Undoubtedly, memories of time spent together with Karen Dawisha in Oxford, OH will continue to feature prominently in the conversations of scholars from around the world.
Those of us to whom benevolent Fortuna gave the chance to work with and befriend Karen will forever remember the unique combination of virtues that characterized her personality. Not every devoted mentor is also a skillful and efficient administrator; not every great colleague is also a brilliant intellectual; not every enchanting raconteur is also a loyal comrade-in-arms; not every accomplished scholar is also an unforgettable teacher. Karen was all these things–but also so much more! With her passing, we lost the role model who guided us through the turbulences of stormy professional and personal waters–a role model we will never forget.
Karen Dawisha is survived by her husband Adeed, children Nadia and Emil, daughter-in-law Emily, and grandson Theo.
— Venelin I. Ganev, Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies, Miami University of Ohio
Angelo Falcón
Angelo Falcón, born June 23, 1951, died May 24, 2018. He was the president and cofounder of the National Institute for Latino Policy (NiLP). He was also a political scientist, activist, organic intellectual, journalist, insurgent, and muckraker. Angelo was all these things. But more than anything, Angelo was a man driven by a profound love for the Puerto Rican and Latino community.
Angelo worked hard and constantly to leverage truth and whatever little power he could muster to improve the conditions of Latinos. He worked with almost no compensation. He forsook creating his own family. But he loved the children and the people he adopted as his. He sacrificed everything to join activism to his scholarship. He sacrificed wealth, professional opportunities, and himself for the Latino community.
Angelo did scientific research and wrote papers in the urban and ethnic politics field. He was published in a variety of peer reviewed journals as well as in edited books. One of his earliest research papers, “Black and Latino Politics in New York City: Race and Ethnicity in a Changing Urban Context,” drew upon his close reading of population and migration data. This 1988 research paper achieved wide impact. It has been cited by others about 48 times, some as recent as 2017.
Most of Angelo’s research was what many call “action research.” Like any political scientist, Angelo aimed for objectivity. He understood that the scientific method is both the best way to minimize bias and to maximize the chances of understanding objective reality. To that end, he was very careful and rigorous in gathering, analyzing, and reporting data. But he also understood that objectivity is complex, fluid, theoretically contested, and socially embedded.
Though most of his action-research was not peer reviewed, Angelo’s research was within the “sphere of scientific discussion,” in Max Weber’s terms. His Latino Opinion Leaders surveys, for example, were not based, as he always explained, on a “scientific sample.” The participants were self-selected, rather than randomly-selected. He assumed that the feedback loop of policy research, empirical findings, and policy actions could check personal bias and make possible some grasp of the objective truth. He did not attempt to derive ideals and goals from empirical analysis. But he believed that existing ideals and goals could be critiqued by data.
Angelo correctly believed that his survey findings were “suggestive of broader trends and attitudes.” Indeed, one September 22, 2016 survey on the presidential election was particularly insightful and prophetic. This survey of the major Latino leaders (Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Other Latinos) was one of the first to suggest that Trump could win the general election. These Latino leaders predicted a Trump victory even though they did not plan to vote for him. In fact, twice as many respondents to this September survey predicted a Trump victory, compared to respondents in a similar NiLP Latino leadership survey in August.
Even the most scientifically framed surveys can suffer severe flaws in question framing, sampling, and results. Given those circumstances, Angelo saw value in his survey work. His surveys, he argued, were a way to “stimulate discussion and debate on critical issues facing the Latino community.” On that level, his repeated surveys of Latino Opinion Leaders were unique and a widely-recognized resource. Nobody else shined this kind of light on Latino political life. This was especially true in the early years before PEW Hispanic began to conduct their own surveys.
What the NiLP surveys lacked in scientific rigor, they more than compensated for with their frequency, timeliness, and impact on Latino political understanding. His surveys, based on a curated sample of Latinos, did, in fact, inform public debate in the Latino community. Many of his survey results were widely reported in a variety of print and electronic media, from the WNBC News website to the online Hispanic Market Weekly. His policy analysis work, like others in this genre, were verified and validated by a continuous and looping public debate and review.
Angelo also tried to check self-bias by insisting on nonpartisanship. Mostly this meant never accepting government funds. In many cases, this amounted to a willingness to take shots at anybody. No one was off limits. It never mattered to him if you were a five-time Latino city council member or the POTUS. His biggest concern was with providing the Latino community truthful information about how government, elected officials, or nonprofit leaders responded to the needs of the Latino community.
Scientific understandings of the political world are often disproven by that world. Soviet specialists had no idea that the Soviet Union would collapse. The 2016 presidential elections seriously damaged a variety of electoral models. It disproved the idea that surveys of voter predictions are more revealing than voter intentions. And it exposed the susceptibility of election polls to nonresponsive voters. These errors demonstrate the difficulty of political science attempts to identify the truth. These persistent failures give some legitimate scholarly space to Angelo’s action–research model.
Many people would be surprised to learn the extent to which Angelo made the political personal. He was driven by an intense passion to address injustice. He propelled boulders of research reports and data analysis at social problems. His use of research to change policy was deep, personal, passionate, and almost supernatural. In ways that may trouble some people, he also threw his own body at social inequities.
Angelo did little to take care of his health. Angelo insisted on eating food that he knew was bad for him. He rejected higher quality medical care that, most likely, could have improved his condition. It was maddening how he insisted on attending a public hospital clinic that was closer to his home, understaffed, and badly serving its mostly working-class Latino patients. He always joked in response to loved one’s pleadings to take better care of his health. More often than not, he delighted in offering macabre stories of his death. He joked, for example, that he was likely to die one day by tripping on the sidewalk and impaling his head on a nail sticking out from a board lying on the street. But Angelo was not being perverse, stubborn, or lazy.
Rather than trivializing his own health, I propose that Angelo was taking a political stand. He sought to distance himself from the privileges that come with economic and political power. So, he rejected healthy food and expert medical care. If Latinos had no access to them, neither would he. He ate meat and starch, fried rather than baked, and fast rather than slow cooking.
It’s possible that these food and lifestyle choices kept Angelo focused and determined to continue fighting for social justice. But I knew him for a long time before we created the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy in 1982. The younger Angelo enjoyed “healthy” food, vacations in foreign places, and the better care offered by expert medical professionals. This continued well into the first three decades of his work with IPR. His focus on injustice never wavered throughout this time. It was within the last eight to ten years that he changed his approach to his health.
Angelo sacrificed himself because of objective conditions. He became stoical and sacrificial about his body as it became clear that he could no longer raise the funds he needed to do his work. Individuals were always generous with donations. Government funds were still out of the question. But some accounting problems made it impossible for NiLP to receive foundation grants. This meant that Angelo could not secure funds from external sources. He chose, then, to fund his work by severely limiting his consumption of the meager resources and time he had to take care of himself.
Angelo once said that a doctor blamed his diabetes on his “hideous” obesity. The doctor certainly had medical data on his side. High rates of obesity correlate with high rates of diabetes. And they correlate with greater frequency in areas with high concentrations of poor Latinos and African Americans. Angelo was naturally offended. Who wants to be called “hideous”?
Angelo knew he was overweight. But he did not see obesity as simply a personal flaw. Latinos and other poor people in America get diabetes all the time. It’s a disease of poverty and inequality within an otherwise prosperous country. Poor Latinos lack the political and economic power to avoid cheap food lacking in nutrition, to secure good healthcare, and to participate in healthy physical activity. Latinos are more often unemployed, disabled, or out of the workforce, like Angelo. What was hideous about obesity was the social conditions that made diabetes possible. He and poor Latinos were not monsters.
Many expect poor people to “improve” themselves. But Angelo understood that individuals usually succeed for the same reasons they fail. Specific social policies and structures produce the conditions that make success or failure possible. The middle class’s higher incomes afford them access to gyms and trainers. They have healthier food choices that reinforces their exercise regimens. And they are helped also by the probability of having family and friends with similar commitments to “self-improvement.”
In these ways Angelo’s health sacrifice was a critique of modern research. Political scientists, like most social scientists, explain social processes from the outside, as observers rather than as participants in political life. In many ways, we have to. Science requires objectivity. The outsider view facilitates objectivity by lowering sympathy to those being studied. We use concepts and data, to explain why people do things, that are obscure to the majority of people we study. Angelo tried hard not to objectify Latinos with his research. He presented his research in simple terms and in colorful language. He was always engaged with the Latino community. He was never aloof or an outsider. Yet he always aimed for objectivity.
What Angelo embraced more than anything was being Puerto Rican, especially a working class, urban Puerto Rican. He never learned how to drive or attended the theater. His life was bound by the bodega, that pre-gentrification relic, he shopped at across the street, especially as he lost his sight and mobility. The pork rinds and sodas that filled the shelves at that bodega not only shaped the health of Latinos in his barrio, but his. He ate what Latinos ate. He lived like they lived.
It would take a newborn village of more economically and politically powerful Latinos to get Angelo to eat his vegetables. His hope must have been that by actively fighting to lift the Latino community, he would lift himself. Angelo came awfully close. Still, the gap that remained encouraged his recent and typical response to those who begged him to commit to “self-improvement.” In his honest, political, caustic, and revealing way, he would say, “Save yourself. It’s too late for me.”
—José Rámón Sánchez, LIU Brooklyn & NiLP
Gordon G. Henderson
Gordon G. Henderson of Spencer, West Virginia, formerly of Atlanta, Georgia, died on Tuesday, April 24, 2018 at the age of 86. He was born in Galetta, Ontario, Canada on October 19, 1931 and moved with his family to Ottawa in 1935. He attended Kent Public School and Lisgar Collegiate Institute. At graduation he won the Hardie scholarship in Greek to attend York College but chose instead to accept a scholarship to Columbia College in New York City, where he earned his BA, MA, and his PhD (1962).
One of the oldest members of the association (he joined in 1953), Gordon taught political science at the Baruch School of City College, Middlebury College, and Millsaps College. He taught both political science and computer science at Texas Tech University, Tougaloo College, and Earlham College. Between 1972 and 1983 Gordon served as the Director of the College Computer Centers of Tougaloo College and Earlham College. Gordon authored three college level textbooks, of which American Government: People, Politics and Policies was far and away his favorite.
Gordon retired from Earlham College in 1983 to begin a career as a consultant with expertise in social science and computer analysis. There followed more than two decades of service in the cause of voting rights. He would want to be remembered for his analysis of election data which supported the claims of minority claimants (African Americans, Native Americans, Chicanos, and women) that existing election arrangements (especially the use of at-large elections) denied them an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.
In 1964 Gordon and his wife, Mary Ann, conducted a study of discriminatory programming of radio and television stations in Jackson, Mississippi that resulted in a precedent-setting ruling in Office of Communications, United Church of Christ v. Federal Election Commission (359 D.2d 994, 1966) which resulted in the denial of the license of station WLBT, the replacement of the station’s ownership, and a radical change in the station’s programming for the better.
Many of Gordon’s students thought him an excellent teacher, but his impact went beyond teaching political science. One student said of him: “Gordon Henderson had more influence upon my life than anyone else except my father.” Another said: “Gordon Henderson taught me to appreciate the beauty of the well-crafted sentence.” That last item of praise Gordon appreciated because he himself did love the beauty of a simple sentence.
But, among his accomplishments–including his teaching and service in the cause of voting rights–the one he was most proud of was being the father of three talented and socially-conscious daughters: Eve Bostic (Bryn Mawr), a weaver; Sara Scheuch (MIT), an engineer and teacher; and Martha Bennett (Barnard and Princeton), an architect.
Gordon is survived by his three daughters, six grandchildren, and Mary Ann, his beloved wife and closest friend of sixty-five years.
—Donald M. Freeman, Igleheart Professor Emeritus, University of Evansville
—F. Glenn Abney, Professor and Chair Emeritus of Political Science, Georgia State University
—Stephen C. Craig, Professor and Director, Political Campaigning Program, Department of Political Science, University of Florida
—Samuel Kernell, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of California San Diego
Robert T. Nakamura
Bob Nakamura was Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University at Albany, State University of New York. He died July 26, 2018, following a battle with stomach cancer. He was 72. Born in the Japanese Internment Camp at Tule Lake, California, in 1945, he was raised in West Los Angeles and obtained his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Having taught at Dartmouth College, the University of California at San Diego, and Saitama National University in Japan, he spent the majority of his academic career at the University at Albany, where he retired in 2015 as Vincent O’Leary Professor.
Bob coauthored five books and countless articles and papers. His academic interests were extraordinarily wide-ranging. His doctoral work and early publications focused on public policy (especially the issues surrounding educational finance) and policy implementation. His first book, coauthored with Frank Smallwood, The Politics of Policy Implementation, was the standard text on the subject for many years. In addition to his early work on public policy, he wrote articles on political parties, on the nominating process in presidential elections, and on parties and elections. A major subject of his research in later years was environmental policy and (with funding from the US Environmental Protection Agency) Europe. This work culminated in two coauthored books published by the Brookings Institution on the implementation of regulatory regimes in hazardous waste cleanup and the Superfund program.
A final area of Bob’s professional interest, one to which he devoted a substantial portion of his time during the final years of his life, was legislative development and democratization. He was widely recognized as an expert in this area and was called upon to participate in projects in a variety of capacities. He worked with the United Nations, the World Bank, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, and USAID. With funding from these organizations, the Ford Foundation, and other foundations and international bodies, he participated in the design, implementation, direction, and assessment of 11 major projects in over two dozen countries in Africa, Latin America, Europe, and the Pacific region.
Bob was an active member of the political science and public policy communities, serving on awards committees, nominating committees, and program committees for the American Political Science Association and the Association for Public Policy and Management. During his years at the University at Albany, he served a three-year term as chair of the Political Science Department and was director of the Center for Legislative Development. He was a tireless contributor to university life. An accomplished mentor, he directed nearly a dozen doctoral dissertations.
While he had a distinguished career as a teacher, researcher, and academic good citizen, Bob will probably be best remembered by those whose lives he touched by his remarkable intelligence, generosity, and by an extraordinary memory that cataloged facts on every imaginable subject. He was widely read in areas that ranged far beyond the scholarly literature of his disciple. He consumed books on history, biography, geography, science, and was able to remember vast arrays of miscellaneous information on the most unlikely subjects. And finally, there was his ever-present and irrepressible sense of humor. Bob was a very funny man, with a biting sense of irony, mixed with a substantial dose of self-deprecation.
Bob is survived by his wife of nearly 50 years, Jaye, his children Jeffrey and Lauren, and two grandsons: James and Pierre.
—Thomas Church, University at Albany, SUNY
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