Dave Robertson

I first met Dave Robertson while sitting in the living room of my damp little bungalow on the southwest side of Berkeley. IRoughly one week into graduate school—buffeted by terms like hot-deck imputation and regression-discontinuity design— and I was more or less convinced that I had chosen the wrong career. I had already tried to self-style as an “APD person.” But maybe I just meant that I study the state, not STATA. In any case, I was learning that I wasn’t a “mainstream” political scientist, whatever that means. But all of this was before I had opened the JSTOR cover page on Dave’s 2005 APSR article, “Madison’s Opponents and Constitutional Design.” I read the first sentence, and I was never really the same: “Understanding American politics since 1789 requires a clear understanding of the founders’ reasons for designing the Constitution the way they did.”

That first sentence is more than a model of style. It captures about the importance of Dave’s scholarship, the imprint he left on our profession, and who Dave was to me and I think so many of us.

While so many articles and books in our field redound to the conclusion that “institutions matter” in shaping American politics, Dave’s scholarship on the Constitution and on federalism reminds us that institutions come from somewhere. Real human beings with passions and preferences (to use Richard Bensel’s phrase) make and remake the rules that govern our lives. If there is one overriding reason why I continue to teach Dave’s work to my undergraduates, it is because he treats the creation of political institutions as the lively, human enterprise it very much is. We learn from Dave’s work on the founding that the opponents of Madison’s Virginia Plan, particularly Roger Sherman, had a far greater impact on American politics than most Americans know; their own battle gave us the fragmented battlefield on which American politics is currently situated. At a moment of political turbulence, it is Dave’s perspective, and not the “static-state” textbook versions of American Politics 101, that I (and my stu-dents) continue to find valuable. Institutions like federalism, Dave’s work helps me to remind them, are not fixed constants but fluid variables, subject to the forces of time and temperature, the work of human hands.

The notion that institutions are constituted by the labor of passionate human beings is no surprise to anyone who knew Dave. The second time I met him, again not in person, was through the immense, assiduously organized reading lists he so lovingly prepared and that graduate students in our field throughout the country use during their comprehensive exams. What kind of person would put this all together? Who was this ray of light in the sad life of the graduate student? The same person, I would later find out, who had championed the APSA Politics and History section through its most embryonic phases. Dave, in short, was instrumental in building and maintaining the institutions he wanted to see in the profession. He did the work to build infrastructures of knowledge that were essential to the way I and so many of my colleagues understand what we study. In addition to being a great thinker, Dave did the often uncompensated, unglamorous, and uncelebrated work of institution building that he described in his scholarship. And for that I am eternally grateful.

But if I knew Dave by reputation to be a selfless builder of the road I walked on, nothing made it click more than the third time I met him (this time, at last, in person). The setting was a Policy History Conference in Richmond, Virginia. I had nervously emailed him to ask if we could chat about my dissertation and he quickly obliged. He had been I think one of three attendees in a panel I had organized and had spent much of the Q&A giving at least as much feedback as the discussant. Dave had this way of making you feel like your crummy seminar paper had all the promise you imagined it might when you started writing it. He had a way of returning life and joy to an idea, even if you felt that your critics (or the critic in your head) had beaten it into submission. It was this ethic of taking other scholars, especially younger scholars, seriously that made Dave an inimitable mentor and teacher. He never skimped on criticism. But he also made it explicit that the criticism came from a place of camaraderie and solidarity. I resolved to not let a conference pass me by without having lunch or a coffee with Dave. The kind of friendship I had with Dave—and that he had with so many others—make being in this profession worth the price of admission. And without the spirit of Dave, we wouldn’t have much of a profession worth talking about. In other words, I'd submit that Dave embodied the conditions under which institutions work.

Dave’s character as a scholar and a mentor was reflected in the public values he held, especially in the work he did with the Confluence chapter of the Scholars Strategy Network. Dave believed in the power of government to improve the lives of the poor, to safeguard the rights of workers, to address the threats of climate change. He fought for the things he believed in with all his might. He never rested. I wondered sometimes if he ever slept. And he reminded me that the rigorous scholar and the political activist were by no means conflicting identities. At some point, Dave started jokingly greeting me with the phrase “How’s the rabble, rouser?”

Needless to say I miss Dave’s voice, his big laugh, and his smile. His life is a testament to the fact that, while we might take institutions for granted, the people who constitute them, who imbue them with meaning, who give them their transformative potential, can never be forgotten. We will never forget you, Dave.

—Philip Rocco, Marquette University

Sheldon W. Simon

Among the titans who bestrode the scholarly world of Asia and its security, few proved as consummate a student of the region as Sheldon Weiss Simon, professor emeritus of political science at Arizona State University, who passed away on January 2, 2021. In an academic career spanning well over five decades (four-fifths of which were spent at Arizona State) with a vita comprising well over 200 research articles and books, Sheldon Simon—“Shell” to his friends and colleagues—assiduously observed, reported on, and critically analyzed developments in Asia and its sub-regions from the Cold War to the present.

A native of Minnesota, Simon was born in Saint Paul on January 31, 1937. A brilliant student from young, it was in high school that Simon began combining academic excellence with a lifelong involvement with musical theater. Indeed, it was as a cast member of a melodrama theater in Cripple Creek, Colorado where Simon met his future bride Charlann Scheid, playing opposite her for 158 performances of the same play. As newlyweds they continued performing on stage together, making enough to finance a trip to Europe. Political science and musical theater were very much intertwined throughout his life, including in delightfully unexpected ways: in 1976, Simon played the lead role of John Adams in the Phoenix Theater’s production of the musical 1776.

Simon was educated at the University of Minnesota where he obtained his BA degree (Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude) in 1958 and his PhD in political science in 1964; in between, he obtained a MA degree from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1960. It was during his undergraduate years where his academic fascination with Asia began. His career, which included a stint as a political analyst with the Central Intelligence Agency, took him to George Washington University and subsequently to the University of Kentucky, where he served briefly as the acting director of UK’s Patterson School of Diplomacy. While in Kentucky, Simon applied for and won a grant from the National Humanities Council to put on musical theater shows for rural Kentuckian communities.

In 1975, he accepted an offer to join Arizona State, where he served as the chair of the ASU political science department and subsequently as the director of the university’s Center for Asian Studies. The quintessential “snowbird” who detested Minnesotan winters, Simon found the warmer Arizonan climes very much to his liking. He also spent a long and productive period as the director for Southeast Asian research at the National Bureau of Asian Research and as a regular contributor on Southeast Asian affairs for Comparative Connections, an e-journal of the Honolulu-based Pacific Forum. Along the way, he held visiting appointments at various universities and regularly consulted for US Government agencies and the private sector.

Simon belonged to the golden generation of scholars who collectively founded Asian security studies. He came of age as a scholar at a time when intellectual suspicion against formal social science theory as a political weapon of the Cold War ran high. Like most Asia specialists of his generation, Simon’s scholarship was predominantly empiricist in orientation, partly because of the shared perception among his peers that Asian data rarely met the assumptions and expectations of Western-centric international theory. That said, he was not loath to engage in theoretically driven work as exemplified by War and Politics in Cambodia: A Communications Analysis (1974) and “Realism and Neoliberalism: International Relations Theory and Southeast Asian Security” (1995). Simon’s oeuvre was prodigious and impressive. Notwithstanding an early concentration on Communist China and its foreign policy towards its Asian neighbors, such as with The Broken Triangle: Peking, Djakarta and the PKI (1969), Simon’s main claim to fame was as a thoughtful sage on Asia’s regional security and particularly on US policy toward Asia with well received works like Southeast Asian Security in the New Millennium (1996), “Is There a US Strategy for East Asia?” (1999), and “Theater Security Cooperation in the US Pacific Command” (2003), inter alia. Simon played a crucial dual role in explaining the complexities of Asia to US audiences—moreover, from 2000 onward and to the envy of his colleagues, he moonlighted as a cruise lecturer, tutoring US travelers on Asian affairs whilst enlightening Asian audiences on the security perspectives, planning, and policies of successive US administrations.

If there was a common thread that ran through all of Simon’s writings, it was his thoughtful concern over the interactions, conflictual as well as collaborative, between the global and the local in Asia from the Cold War to the present. In “Davids and Goliaths: Small Power-Great Power Security Relations in Southeast Asia” (1983), Simon provided what, in a key sense, had all along been his principal concern: the seemingly irresoluble gaps in perception and interest between great powers and small countries that require careful management through collective action. In riposte to this enduring puzzle, Simon wrote extensively on the efforts by Southeast Asian countries to construct a regionalism through regional organization in the form of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), built not only to facilitate intraregional reconciliation among ASEAN member states themselves, but engagement with the great powers and other extra-regional powers and international actors. His prodigious scholarship on ASEAN included The ASEAN States and Regional Security (1982), the work that brought this acolyte to the feet of the guru himself at ASU. In an early nod toward what scholars like Peter Katzenstein would later christen “analytical eclecticism,” Simon, avoiding the crass reductionism of analysts who readily dismiss ASEAN as a pansy of an organization that serially overpromises but significantly underdelivers, saw Southeast Asian regional institutional life in constant theoretical tension (see, “Realism and Neoliberalism”).

Notwithstanding his occasional dabble in international theory, Simon remained unwedded to a particular theoretical and/ or ideological persuasion. That said, it is possible to detect a tacit liberal mien in some of his observations on Asia, as exemplified by his essay “Security, Economic Liberalism, and Democracy: Asian Elite Perceptions of Post-Cold War Foreign Policy Values” (1996). Empirical accuracy was what Simon consistently sought for in his scholarship. The astute student of US foreign policy that he was, Simon was deeply concerned with what he saw as the Trump administration’s “abandonment” of the traditional global leadership role played by the United States—a responsibility that had been assumed by virtually every US administration since the end of the Second World War. It is safe to say that Simon likely welcomed the prospect of a Biden administration as that means America’s return to the international and multilateral fold.

In a fundamentally different respect than the leadership vacuum caused by America’s recusal from its global responsibilities, a great void of another kind has been created as a consequence of the passing on January 2 of an equally “great power”—one defined not by military might but of unparalleled intellectual heft and academic leadership. “His record of seeking truth from the facts on the ground as they have emerged in Asia and offering sound judgments about what they mean and how to respond to them, is unsurpassed,” as William Tow wrote in his contribution to a 2018 festschrift in honor of Simon. “His work and insights serve as a model for all of us who remain concerned about US relations with Asia and beyond.” Aspiring and upcoming scholars would do well to take note of Professor Tow’s words.

But perhaps more crucial than his illustrious academic career, it was the very essence of the man that stood out most to those who knew him best. Slight of stature—but capable of playing a mean game of tennis and rocking a turtleneck sweater even on a warm summer day—Simon was a veritable giant of a man: big of heart, hospitable and generous to a fault, and a consummate diplomat and peacemaker (whose Hebrew name, quite appropriately, was Shalom). More than just an outstanding scholar, educator, mentor, and musical thespian, Simon was an honorable and classy gentleman who taught us, who taught me, how to live right and well. He will be sorely missed.

—See Seng Tan, International Students Inc. and Nanyang Technological University

Christian Søe

Professor Christian Søe, a member of the Department of Political Science at California State University, Long Beach since 1967, passed away peacefully on March 12, 2021. He was an extraordinarily well-loved colleague, friend, teacher, and researcher, and his loss is mourned by his wide-ranging community of friends and family. An expert on German politics, particularly on German political parties and the special role of the German Free Democratic Party (FDP), he taught courses on Western European politics, comparative politics, political theory, and American politics until his retirement as professor emeritus in 2006.

Søe was born in Denmark in 1936, growing up there through his early youth. Following the Second World War, Søe’s widowed mother moved the family to British Columbia, where he completed high school. He completed his BA degree in political science at the University of British Columbia, after specialized studies at the University of Michigan, McGill University (advanced French) and Middlebury College (advanced Russian). Deciding to pursue an academic career, he attended the Free University of Berlin for his graduate studies, receiving his PhD summa cum laude in 1972. In 1975, the University published his two-volume doctoral dissertation: Politische Kontrolle und Verantwortlichkeit in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland am Ende der Adenauer-Ära: Eine Verlaufsanalyse der Spiegel-Affäre.

Apart from his research specialization on German liberalism, Søe published works on a number of other topics, including Danish-German relations, Denmark during the Second World War, the practice of direct democracy in California, neoliberalism in Canada and the US, and more. In the wider discipline, he was perhaps best known for editing 25 consecutive annually revised editions of Comparative Politics (McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, Inc., 1983–2007), the most widely used anthology for introductory courses on comparative politics in the American academy.

But it was in his specialization of German politics that Søe made his deepest and most important mark as a political scientist and scholar. After publishing his doctoral dissertation on the Der Spiegel Affair, he authored 11 book chapters and journal articles on German politics, most of them on German liberalism and the FDP. He coauthored several more book chapters in edited volumes. He also published nine entries on German liberalism and German liberal political leaders in the two-volume Modern Germany (Garland Publishing, 1998). In addition, Søe coedited six influential books on German politics, German political parties, and German foreign policy. As an internationally known leading scholar on the special role of the FDP in German politics, Søe’s work on Germany’s political party system and the FDP both preceded and followed the stunningly rapid transformation of German politics via the country’s reunification in 1989. He also presented more than 50 scholarly papers and/ or scholarly lectures at professional conferences and similar venues in the US, the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden.

Søe’s distinguished scholarship was enhanced by his wide-ranging and frequent travels to observe German politics in action. In recognition of his expertise, he was an invited observer of eight consecutive Bundestag elections in Germany, from 1980 to 2005. The first seven of these were organized and sponsored by the German government’s Information and Press Office. The eighth (2005) was organized and sponsored by the UK-based Association for the Study of German Politics and the US-based German Studies Association. Søe was also an invited observer of the first free election to the Volkskammer in East Germany in March 1990. As an invited member of these election observer teams, Søe met with and came to know multiple political leaders, scholars, and influential journalists from all shades of German politics.

Through these wide-ranging friendships and professional contacts, he was able to organize a very influential series of six biannual Pacific Workshops on German Affairs that were held on the campus of California State University, Long Beach. These were three-day events, beginning in 1983 and until 2001 (a period during which Germany went through some of the most consequential changes in the last half of the twentieth century), bringing together scholars on German affairs from throughout the world, including some of Germany’s leading scholars of politics. Søe organized and hosted the workshops virtually on his own, and did the fund-raising as well, garnering enough funds to bring all the scholars on the program to the event at no cost to themselves. One of the leading polling experts in Germany wrote to Christian’s wife after he passed: “He invited guests whom others would not have had the courage to ask. Nobody could say ‘no’ to Christian because he was a person you could not say ‘no’ to… [In the late 1980s his conference included] east Germans coming with the ‘watch dogs’ of the SED party and unqualified party ranks. Nobody could have done this other than Christian.” The Søe family often opened their home to traveling scholars, journalists, and political leaders from Germany and other European locales who were spending time in southern California. He was a consummate host: gregarious, generous and thoughtful, and enjoyed nothing more than talking about politics and ideas until late in the night.

In addition to his scholarship, Søe contributed to a broad range of professional associations and organizations. He was a long-term member of the American Political Science Association and its Organized Sections on Comparative Politics, Political Organizations and Parties, and Politics and Society in Europe. He was an active member of the Conference Group on German Politics (for which he served as vice president and western regional director), the European Community Studies Association, the Eastern German Studies Group, the German Studies Association, and the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies. He was the director of the political science section for three annual conferences of the German Studies Association, and organizer of numerous panels at conferences of the Western Political Science Association, the German Studies Association, the American Political Science Association, and the International Studies Association.

Søe also provided an extraordinary amount of service to the Department of Political Science at California State University, as well as to the college and university as a whole. In addition to serving on multiple committees each year, he spent more than a decade as graduate coordinator for the political science department, helping to shepherd an unusually large coterie of graduate students through their MA and MS degrees, as well as serving on the university’s Graduate Council. He was an immensely hard-working and gifted teacher, and students from first year to graduate levels appreciated his talent for wrapping political knowledge into stories seen from a human and humane perspective. Unusually available for office hour consultations, he would work tirelessly with students, trying to help them improve their academic skills, as well as their life coping skills. His colleagues also benefitted consistently from Christian’s generous spirit and expertise as a teacher and scholar, and he provided mentorship to a number of junior colleagues throughout his career on the campus.

Among Christian’s favorite teaching stories was of his arrival from Berlin to CSU Long Beach in 1967 when, not having taken a course in US politics or been a resident in the country, he was assigned to teach a freshman-level course on US Government, one of the four courses he was assigned during that first semester of his teaching career. As was his manner, he buckled down to work, staying up to all hours of the night, even sleeping on his desk, prepping to teach a course on this very strange system of government. And he taught US politics with great skill and insight throughout his teaching career.

Christian Søe is survived by his wife of 50 years, Dr. Louise Søe, three adult children, and two grandchildren. He will be sorely missed by all who knew and loved him.

—Ron Schmidt, California State University, Long Beach

—Robert Delorme, California State University, Long Beach