Brice Acree

Brice Acree, a bright young scholar of political methodology and American politics, died unexpectedly in Columbus, Ohio on November 11, 2019. He was 32 years old. Brice was born in Lexington, Kentucky, but grew up in Magnolia, Kentucky, which he called home. He went to Dartmouth College, where he graduated with an AB in French and government. Before attending graduate school, Brice worked for the polling firm International Republican Institute, an organization that promotes democracy abroad. During that time, he worked on a variety of elections, including the 2004 presidential contest in the Republic of Georgia. The Georgian election was mired in fraud, and Brice— as the only French speaker in the American office—was central in facilitating communication with French and Georgian international election workers.

He entered the graduate program in political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2012. From early on, as a graduate student, his methodological savvy made him a sought-after source of advice, including by professors. In an article that emerged from one such collaboration and was published in the Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Brice, Yanchuan Sim, Justin Gross, and Noah Smith propose a measure of candidates’ ideological position based on a corpus of political writings and a domain-informed Bayesian HMM to infer the proportion of ideologies each candidate uses in each domain.

In 2016, Brice defended his dissertation, “Deep Learning and Ideological Rhetoric,” advised by Professor Jim Stimson. The dissertation developed a new technique for measuring political ideology based on speech. Brice found that political ideology was significantly more varied than differences between left and right ideology. In his analysis, he identified nine unique ideological groups in American politics, spanning socialists and religious liberals on the left to religious conservatives and populist conservatives on the right. This approach offered a more complex and nuanced account of political scientists’ understanding of political ideology in American politics and is likely to influence future research.

After defending his dissertation, Brice started a tenure track position in the political science department at Ohio State University. He was hired as part of the Data Analytics Discovery Theme (now the Translational Data Analytics Institute) and his work and teaching inspired a significant cohort of collaborators and mentees among graduate and undergraduate students in the Department of Political Science. During his tenure at Ohio State, Brice worked on a variety of research projects. His first authored piece in American Politics Research (with Justin Gross, Noah Smith, Yanchuan Sim and Amber Boydstum) expanded on some of the concepts developed in his dissertation. In the piece, Brice explored how candidates used political speech to appear partisan during primary election and centrist during general elections.

At the time of his death, Brice was involved in several other research projects exploring issue framing, representation in American media, and text analysis. In a working paper with Skyler Cranmer and Jared Edgerton, Brice analyzed the descriptive representation of the Democratic and Republican parties on the major news networks. He found that partisan media outlets were more likely to feature stereotypes of the out-party. Brice also worked on several methods pieces. In an unfinished manuscript with Adam Lauretig and Caleb Pomeroy, Brice sought to introduce word embeddings to political science and to develop more powerful scaling procedures for political texts. This process could have been used to infer the political ideology of a text corpus or political rhetoric.

Brice’s significant contributions to political science combined a keen understanding of complex methodological analysis of text as data with a sharp and original theoretical awareness, leading to sophisticated work that clarified how political ideology works, proposed new ways tocapture its internal diversity, and showed that politicians are able to use it strategically in front of different audiences and political arenas. If given more time, Brice could have advanced our understanding of political speech in America even more significantly than he did and made further innovations in methodological techniques for the study of politics.

Outside of his research, Brice’s teaching and advising inspired a significant cohort of collaborators and mentees among graduate and undergraduate students in the Department of Political Science. Graduate students remark that Brice had a real knack for explaining complex concepts in a simple way and we here at Ohio State see his legacy alive in all the students he helped. His graduate student collaborators noted that he was a creative and dedicated researcher and kind collaborator. Moreover, while trained as an Americanist and methodologist, he worked with IR faculty and students, attended network science panels, and was planning to start a project with a comparative politics professor, speaking to his ability to find interesting projects outside of his main interests. Despite being a junior faculty member, Brice was popular among graduate students, having recruited many of them to work with him and advising many others. Brice’s commitment to research went beyond mentoring graduate students on their own research. He had an active role in helping graduate students develop course syllabi for undergraduate methods classes and was also a committed teacher. Students loved his humor and were surprised at his approachability, feeling comfortable in his lectures despite the technical subject matter of his teaching.

Brice was also passionate about politics outside of work. Harry Enten, a senior writer and analyst at CNN and Brice’s classmate at Dartmouth, noted that he could always rely on Brice’s friendship when he faced a challenge at CNN’s The Forecast Fest. His solid and fast work in the shadows allowed the CNN team to present accurate forecasts to the audience. Most recently, Brice helped develop the CNN 2018 midterm election forecast.

Aside from his interest in politics, Brice enjoyed cooking and traveling in his personal time. He collected napkin holders from every place he traveled to, including Nice, Nuremberg, Dublin, and Charleston, SC. Brice is survived by his wife, Lauren Acree, and their son, Theodore.

—Jared Edgerton, The Ohio State University

—Inés Valdez, The Ohio State University

Maurice Auerbach

Dr. Maurice S. Auerbach, age 85, passed away on April 2, 2020, in Queens, New York, one of the many victims there of the COVID-19 virus. Dr. Auerbach had taught politics and political philosophy to university students in the New York City metropolitan area for nearly four decades, preceding retirement. He taught at several schools, including the graduate program in liberal studies at the New School for Social Research, and at both St. John’s University and St. Francis College. He arrived in New York after completing his undergraduate and early graduate studies at the University of Chicago (AB, 1958, and AM, 1959). His doctorate was from the New School (PhD, 1975).

Each of his degrees was in political science, but his approach to and perspectives on “the science of politics” were far richer than the profession’s standard fare. While at Chicago he had studied with Leo Strauss, the internationally acclaimed political philosopher whose studies were notoriously complex but uniquely insightful in uncovering classically probing and rich insights into human affairs and restoring them to their rightful seriousness. At the New School he studied with, among others, Howard B. White, Hilail Gildin, and Allan Bloom.

Auerbach once described, in a review article, what may be taken also as the focus of his life’s work: “Political society is founded on, and sustained by, our opinions about the way we should live, about the just and the unjust. [This study]…not only prepares the potential philosopher but educates the citizens and statesmen in the natural end of political activity—the intermediate end of human life—virtue.” For those who knew him, Auerbach’s studies and teaching encompassed virtually the entire history of Western thought on politics and political philosophy, particularly its bearing on living life well in the American republic and the midst of modernity.

Auerbach’s grasp of the history and views of these fundamental questions, supplemented by his own elaborations and further developments regarding them, were the stuff of near-endless delight and learning to those fortunate friends who shared his company during long dinner-discussions and walks and phone conversations over more than 50 years. The tenor and direction of his enormously engaging scholarship is typified by a few of his writings: “The Political Thought of Spinoza” (master’s thesis), “Jonathan Swift and the Quarrel with Modern Politics” (doctoral dissertation), “The Philosophical Politics of Leo Strauss” (in Teaching Political Science, 1985), and “Carl Schmitt’s Quest for the Political” (in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Winter 1993–94). Auerbach served for many years on the editorial board of Interpretation, as well as occasional guest editor for other journals, among them the New School’s Social Research.

Among the many thinkers he considered, Swift may have anticipated Auerbach’s own inclinations and manner most closely. Swift condemned how “modern politics” so fundamentally distorts both thought and action, and clearly preferred the dignity, nobility, and profundity of history’s “ancients” and their grasp of philosophy and politics. Swift wrote not only with genius but with wit and biting sarcasm—traits that shone in Auerbach.

Auerbach’s reservations about the social, political, and theoretical conventions of our time were profound and, among friends, expressed candidly and vehemently. On such occasions he would sometimes share his passion for classical music, particularly opera. On every possible occasion he would turn talk to one or both of probably his most abiding political concerns: the freedom and virtue of Americans, and the life of the Jewish people whom he also loved. And no conversation, on nearly any topic, went far before he would raise examples from his prodigious recall of political and cultural facts or events, cited effortlessly from anywhere along the ancient-to-contemporary timeline—drawing parallels and “connecting the dots” with uncanny genius.

Not surprisingly, Maurice Auerbach did not reveal himself easily, and chose friendships sparingly. His friends delighted in his company and always left it both bettered and eager to return to the conversation.

Yet suddenly, and striking grief into friends’ hearts, the conversation has ended. And with it the joy of his presence, with his peculiar wry chuckle, at some offered insight or remark, and that slightly mischievous glance always looking for the others’ response—always seeking the sequel or next thought.

Maurice Shor Auerbach was born February 9, 1935, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He was the son of Bennett and Irene Auerbach, both Russian immigrants to America. Following good family years at home, Auerbach left for college and his life of study and teaching; he returned home, or to varied locations where his siblings and other family had moved, for extended visits in most years. His love of theater and music, which had developed at home, spanned his lifetime—as it happened, he attended an opera, which he praised for its power in limning aspects of man’s spirit, just days before being hospitalized. His family loved his visits, and warmly recalls his special way of telling stories from his childhood and family experiences.

He is preceded in death by his parents, Bennett and Irene; his brother, Leonard; and sister, Rita Berman. He will be truly missed by his nieces, nephews, family, friends, and his cat Venus.

Arrangements are under the care of Sinai Chapels, Queens, New York, with interment in the company of his family at Moore Cemetery, Hattiesburg, Mississippi. A private memorial and celebratory dinner with family and friends will be convened at a later date.

—George W.S. Kuhn

—Ken Masugi, Johns Hopkins University

—Dennis E. Teti, Regent University

Ole R. Holsti

Ole R. Holsti, George V. Allen Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Duke University, died on July 2, 2020, at the age of 86 from complications of lymphoma. He was a noted authority on public opinion and American foreign policy, belief systems and foreign policy, and decision-making, as well as having been a pioneer of content analysis in the early part of his career. Much of his work was at the interface of psychology and political science. He held both a BA (1954) and PhD (1962) from Stanford University. He was on the Duke faculty on a full-time basis from 1974 to 1998, after teaching at Stanford, the University of British Columbia, and the University of California, Davis. He remained active while an emeritus member of the Duke faculty, publishing Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy in 2004.

Professor Holsti was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford) and a Guggenheim Fellow in 1981–82. He was president of the International Studies Association in 1979–80 and of ISA West in 1969–70. He received distinguished lifetime achievement awards from both the American Political Science Association and the International Society for Political Psychology. He received the Nevitt Sanford Award from the International Society for Political Psychology, the Howard Johnson Award for Distinguished Teaching, and the Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award. In 2014, ISA West honored him with a Distinguished Scholar Award, which is now awarded annually and named in his honor.

Professor Holsti was part of the first wave of scholars who brought the methods of behavioralism to bear on questions of foreign policy, particularly crisis management and foreign policy world views—topics that had hitherto been the province principally of historians and political philosophers. His path-breaking work on content analysis was among his most influential scholarship, shaping the field for decades. Building on this work, he developed a long-term collaboration with James Rosenau studying the foreign policy attitudes of both elites and the general public. He was a key figure arguing against the so-called Almond-Lippmann consensus that dismissed American public opinion as hopelessly inchoate and ill-informed; Holsti argued that public attitudes, at both the elite and mass level, moved in rational ways in response to changing circumstances. Though a sharp critic of American foreign policy mistakes, Holsti’s scholarship reflected an underlying optimism that the democratic process could prove resilient and restorative even after costly errors.

To his professional associates, students, and personal acquaintances, Professor Holsti was an exemplary colleague, mentor, and friend. He read others’ work carefully, offering perceptive suggestions, always in a positive vein. In department meetings, he could be counted on to bring thoughtful values, not personal interest or bias, to the discussions at hand. It was hard for others to act up when Ole was in the room. He was relentlessly determined and independent to the end of his life. Those of us who knew Ole Holsti personally also admired him for other qualities. He was a dedicated road and trail runner, later taking up competitive race-walking only after most people give up walking quickly at all. He was outspoken on issues of foreign policy where he had a strong view. He was personally generous. He was a dedicated father and grandfather. He was relentlessly determined and independent to the end of his life.

After Professor Holsti had retired from Duke and his wife had died, he moved to Salt Lake City to be near his daughter, Maija, her husband, and his two beloved grandchildren. Even during his last illness, he had the determination, although weak, successfully to walk across the stage with his family for his grandson’s high school graduation. As his daughter has written, the appropriate word for Ole in Finnish is sisu, which means “extraordinary determination in the face of extreme adversity, and courage that is presented typically in situations where success is unlikely. It expresses itself in taking action against the odds, and displaying courage and resoluteness in the face of adversity.”

Professor Holsti’s colleagues at Duke, his friends in the profession, and his friends in the world of runners, will miss him enormously.

—Peter D. Feaver, Duke University

—Robert O. Keohane, Princeton University

Wade Jacoby

Wade Jacoby, Mary Lou Fulton Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University, died February 29, 2020, while pursuing one of his many passions, mountain biking in Southern Utah. Wade was weeks shy of his 56th birthday, far too young. It was quick, there was nothing anyone could have done, and Wade was with friends, doing what he loved. An avid outdoorsman, Wade leaves behind his wife Kindra, adult daughters Taylor, Clementine, and Kendall, a new grandchild, and hundreds of colleagues, students, and friends who were shocked and deeply saddened to learn of his untimely death.

Wade was an outstanding scholar, teacher and mentor who lifted everyone up—and helped make the academy better by leading with kindness, integrity and academic excellence. He was a deeply engaged colleague who always offered generous and insightful comments—and delivered them with understated humility and countryside or sports humour. Wade believed that hard work should be coupled with play. He knew just how to turn an ordinary day into an adventure. He added hikes, bike rides, skiing, and fishing to the events he planned and the trips he took. He always took time to visit with his many friends and to talk about what is important in life. Whether you were a close friend or a young scholar, years later he would remember a conversation and ask for an update about an idea or a research project or a growing family.

Wade stands among the most influential comparative political economists studying Germany and also Eastern Europe and the enlargement of the European Union over the last three decades. His intellectual curiosity and his scholarly contributions were vast, spanning all of Europe, political economy and security policy, domestic European politics and international institutions, local issues, migration and economic globalization. His first book, Imitation in Politics: Redesigning Modern Germany (Cornell University Press, 2000), examined the fate of a range of institutions, from industrial relations to secondary education, transplanted into Germany by Allied victors. His second book, The Enlargement of the European Union and NATO: Ordering from the Menu in Central Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2004), explored how Central European countries selected a range of NATO and European practices to adopt, with a focus on when transplants succeeded and when they created fiascos.

The themes of transplants, successes and failures, European influence, and German politics reappeared across Wade’s myriad articles and book chapters, many of which he coauthored with colleagues and friends. A 2006 review article in World Politics, “Inspiration, Coalition, and Substitution,” guided an emerging literature on how external actors can create informal coalitions with domestic leaders in cementing commitments to policy reform. His remarkably creative book chapter, “How Agents Matter,” coauthored with his BYU colleague, Darren Hawkins, helped to launch the application of principal-agent theory to international relations as it critiqued it, and it remains a standard reference in the literature. He published scores of other notable journal articles, edited volume chapters and policy studies across a remarkably interdisciplinary range of fields including political science, economics, sociology, public policy, and law.

Wade also coedited several prominent collective projects. “Europe and the Management of Globalization,” his 2010 special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy coedited with Sophie Meunier (also published as a Routledge book of the same name), has been influential in shaping scholarly debate on how the European Union has attempted to regularize the competitive order of globalization without succumbing to protectionism or embracing laissez-faire capitalism. In 2014 Wade also coedited with Meunier and Brian Burgoon “The Politics of Hosting Chinese Investment in Europe,” a special issue of the Asia-Europe Journal that was one of the first explorations of the political challenges posed by the phenomenon of Chinese direct investment in EU countries. Another special issue that Wade coedited, this time with Rachel Epstein, was “Eastern enlargement ten years on: transcending the east-west divide?” in the Journal of European Public Policy in 2014. As he so often did in his career, Wade hosted a workshop that buzzed with supportive, rigorous and incisive debate—and thus helped produce a collection of articles that has guided the scholarship on EU enlargement ever since.

Wade was also a beloved teacher at Brigham Young University and, before that, at Grinnell College. His gifts as a communicator were rare and admirable. Students were enthralled by his vast knowledge, his elocution, his wit—and his talents as a storyteller. He could spin a tale with the best of them while focusing on important concepts his students needed to learn. Wade was particularly passionate about helping students become effective writers and encouraging his peers to teach writing more effectively. As a teacher Wade was very demanding: he had high expectations, and did not accept sloppy thinking or writing. But students also knew that he cared deeply about them. He was fully invested in their learning and in their lives. Wade also translated his love of teaching into support for young scholars, going out of his way at conferences to appreciate their work and give them advice and positive affirmation at a critical time in their career.

Beyond his influential scholarship and teaching, Wade was known as the least nerdy of all political scientists. In high school during the 1980s, he was a standout athlete in baseball, football, and basketball in the state of Washington. Though he attended BYU as an undergraduate on an academic scholarship, he was a backup infielder for the Cougars and also walked onto the football team as a receiver. He spent summers working on Alaskan fishing boats, and he brought into conversations lessons learned working with his hands, on farms and in the woods. After graduation and before his PhD studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he quarterbacked the Bonn Jets to the German national championship in American-rules football. Wade was an accomplished bow hunter and fly fisherman and loved many other outdoor activities, including mountain biking, hiking, and canyoneering.

In the many tributes that flowed online and in person, people from all parts of Wade’s life commented that he was one of their best friends and simply one of the best human beings any of us knew. Tributes came from people who worshiped with Wade, who participated in a Boy Scout troop Wade led (even though he was the father of daughters), and who knew Wade as their teacher, grad school or faculty colleague or academic collaborator or acquaintance. How was it humanly possible for so many people, with very different backgrounds and connections to Wade, to treasure him as one of their favorite people in the world?

The answer to this question was in the many tributes. Wade was a cheerleader for everyone. He was kind, respectful, gentle, incredibly generous, with a great and often self-effacing sense of humor. He was an incredible listener. He was a wonderful family man—visibly happy in that role. He shared his life with others, who came to respect the many different dimensions of Wade. He brought light into every room and perceptive humor into every situation. In a faculty meeting discussing a job posting, Wade suggested that the ad include a sentence saying, “The Political Science Department seeks small acorns who aspire to be great oaks.” This typically pithy and charming comment delighted his colleagues, capturing the essence of the idea even if the sentence could never appear in an ad.

Wade was especially dedicated to advocating for women and minorities. He had a special ability to be a friend and supporter of women, spending a lot of time and energy mentoring female students and advocating for women’s issues. In the same spirit, for many years he and Kindra hosted a Martin Luther King Day party to explicitly recognize what he called the “most under-celebrated holiday in America.” Each year, he would invite dozens to his house, cook amazing food, invite attendees to provide thoughts on equality and justice, and provide relevant books as gifts to help everyone better understand racial issues.

As we remember Wade, we note that the cardiology report revealed severe blockage in an artery on the left side and, on the right side, an enlarged heart that was compensating for the blockage. His heart had also created new arteries on the right side to ensure ongoing life. In other words, we still lost Wade far too early. But we could have lost him a lot earlier still, and were thus blessed with perhaps many extra years thanks to Wade’s consistent exercise, his enlarged heart and, amazingly, the new arteries he built. It is a metaphor for Wade’s life generally: unceasing efforts, a heart capable of encompassing everyone, and innovative paths to make it all work. Wade was a great and gentle oak; we will bask in his shade, missing him as a scholar and a friend.

—Karen J. Alter, Northwestern University

—Brian Burgoon, University of Amsterdam

—Darren Hawkins, BYU

—Sophie Meunier, Princeton University

—Dan Nielson, BYU

—Milada Anna Vachudova, UNC Chapel Hill

—Sven Wilson, BYU

Richard Matland

The world of political science lost an outstanding contributor to our profession when Richard E. Matland died prematurely on August 12, 2018, aged 61. In his three decades as a professional, Rick overcame multiple burdens and achieved a formidable record as a researcher, teacher, and in myriad other dimensions, all the while enjoying other aspects of life.

Rick was born in Madison, Wisconsin, of Norwegian heritage. He held a lifelong attachment to Norway, spoke Norwegian fluently, and published in the language. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in political science and economics and later an MA from the same institution, Rick attended the University of Michigan in a cohort of outstanding graduate students in the late 1980s. The major publication from his 1991 PhD thesis, “Synthesizing the Implementation Literature: The Ambiguity-Conflict Model of Policy Implementation” (Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 1995) has become a standard in the field and his most-cited article, according to Google Scholar. It was reprinted in three separate public administration readers, one through six editions.

His first regular academic position was at the University of Houston (1990–2006). Houston provided a dynamic environment in which a young, ambitious scholar could function. He quickly found several amenable co-authors and began publishing behavioral studies, many concerned with gender representation, in major journals after winning the 1991 Best Paper in Women and Politics Award from the Southern Political Science Association. These studies, highlighting comparative study of institutions and the importance of electoral systems, especially district magnitude, constitute a second set of high-impact publications. A third significant contribution was a coauthored paper on comparative legislative turnover in Western democracies (British Journal of Political Science, 2004).

Among the other journals in which Rick published were the American Journal of Political Science, Canadian Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Political Psychology, Political Research Quarterly, and Social Science Quarterly. He also coedited the book Women’s Access to Political Power in Post-Communist Europe (Oxford University Press, 2003). Reflecting his Michigan education, Rick was a careful methodologist, but one who was always interested in relating the appropriate techniques to a substantive research question in a broadly understandable manner. Before it was fashionable,

Rick focused on causal inference. Rick took an active role in the teaching and governance functions of the UH department, including winning a Social Science Teaching Award. He also participated in various US and international professional associations and received several research grants from domestic and international sources. As he became an internationally recognized scholar, Rick also accepted visiting positions at the University of Trondheim, University of Bergen, and the Kellogg Institute of International Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

In 2006, Rick returned to the Midwest as the Helen Houlahan Rigali Chair in Political Science at Loyola University Chicago, where one of his passions was to mentor graduate students and younger faculty. He expanded his research interest in experimental political science, especially voter mobilization, which constituted a large portion of his scholarship in the latter part of his career. In this research Rick contributed to the emergence of large-N randomized field experiments that investigated ways to strengthen the pillar of democracy, political participation. In 2008, together with his Loyola colleague Olga Avdeyeva, he received a $375,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for a project on women leaders in Russian regions. The project involved a large collection of survey and experimental data on public evaluation of women as political leaders across four diverse multiethnic regions of the Russian Federation. That huge data-set resulted in scholarly articles published in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Politics and Gender, and Post-Soviet Affairs.

In 2008, Rick was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease of the lungs, which necessitated constant mechanical assistance in breathing and eventually a lung transplant. Nonetheless, he continued his teaching and active research agenda, engaging in significant travel to Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, India, Turkey, and Siberia.

Rick Matland was a highly social creature. If you were a collaborator of Rick’s, you were also likely to become his friend. Over the years he both hosted and visited many of his colleagues in their respective homes, and the families came to know each other. Rick and his Norwegian wife Aud raised two daughters, Nora and Emma, and he was a very caring and engaged father. Rick had wide interests in popular culture, including music, movies, and spectator sports.

He was an excellent source of recommendations on live music and theater wherever he lived—as his Kinky Friedman office poster suggested! But he never lost track of the coming trends in political science as a discipline and in the real world. When he took the position at Loyola University Chicago, Rick chose to reside partially in Madison, where he reestablished relations with some childhood friends. That enabled him to understand at an early stage some of the grassroots right-wing rebellion which led to Republican victories in Wisconsin state and presidential elections. Rick Matland was a font of knowledge about political science and political scientists, a source of information and insight for anyone who sought his counsel. He was on the executive committee of the Midwest Political Science Association and served on the editorial boards of the American Political Science Review, Journal of Experimental Political Science, Politics and Gender, and Women and Politics.

After a trip to his cabin in Norway and a tour of the US with his family to visit some academic friends in the summer of 2018, Rick was hospitalized with pneumonia and died suddenly. Because of the medications necessary to maintain his donated lung, he was very susceptible to infection and succumbed to an antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection. He was a brave, caring, and affable person and a distinguished scholar. He touched the lives of many colleagues, students, friends, and family.

Two memorial funds in Rick’s name (one for research, one to aid families in financial need) have been arranged at the University of Wisconsin’s transplant unit. In recognition of his scholarship, his colleagues and friends in 2019 established the Richard E. Matland Award in the Midwest Political Science Association for the best paper by an emerging scholar (untenured faculty member or graduate student) in representation, elections, or voting. We are proud to be included among the many who have contributed to these causes.

—Donley T. Studlar, West Virginia University and East Tennessee State University

—Scott Gates, University of Oslo and Peace Research Institute Oslo

—Michael D. Martinez, University of Florida

—Gregg R. Murray, Augusta University

—Annette Steinacker, Loyola University Chicago

—Raymond Tatalovich, Loyola University Chicago

Elijah Walter Miles

Elijah Walter Miles, a constitutional law scholar and social justice activist, passed away at the age of 86 in San Diego, California, at about midnight on July 8, 2020. He passed away peacefully in the company of family members.

Miles was known by friends and colleagues as “Wally”—a nickname he picked up during his graduate school days at Indiana University. Family members referred to him as “E.W.” He was also known as E. Walter Miles and E. Wally Miles.

Miles worked as a distinguished political science professor for about 36 years. He was employed at San Diego State University (SDSU) during most of his academic career. His areas of specialty were constitutional law, the courts, and civil rights. He was a very influential and charismatic faculty member at SDSU where he designed curricula in constitutional law and the courts, and served as department chair between 1995 and 1998. As one of the early African American professors at SDSU, and the only African American professor on campus at the time he arrived in 1966, Miles became known in the university as the “Godfather of Black faculty.”

Earning his PhD in 1962, Miles was part of the earliest wave of African Americans to obtain a doctorate degree in political science. He worked closely with other trailblazing African American political scientists, such as Jewel Prestage and Lucius Barker, to study the status of African Americans in the political science profession, recruit more African American political science professors, and improve the conditions for those already working in the field.

Motivated by a strong determination for social justice, Miles complemented his scholarly activities with political activism. He was involved in efforts to desegregate public facilities while a graduate student and during his earliest years as a professor. He was active with the national American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He was also active in local chapters of the ACLU and Urban League.

Miles was born on May 4, 1934, in Hearne, Texas. His parents, Millie Miles and John Miles, raised him, along with his seven siblings, in the small East Texas town in which he was born. Although his parents never attended college, they were determined to provide all of their children with an opportunity to have a college education. The advice Miles’s parents provided each child was to “get it in your head and no one can take it away from you.” His parents were successful with their message. All eight children ultimately attended, and graduated from, college. Miles was the fifth child to attend college, and his youngest brother, Charles Miles, was a member of the first class of African Americans to attend the University of Texas at Austin.

Miles began his undergraduate education in 1951 at Prairie View A&M University. While at Prairie View A&M University, he became a leader of the varsity debate team, assumed leadership roles in national honor societies, and was voted by his classmates to be the “most likely to succeed.” Jewel Prestage, the first African American woman to earn a PhD in political science in the United States, taught and mentored Miles while he was at Prairie View A&M University. Miles met his future wife, Frances Winfield of Fort Worth, Texas, while he was an undergraduate student.

Immediately after obtaining his BA from Prairie View A&M University, Miles was appointed as a commissioned officer in the United States Army. He served in Korea for about two years and then returned to the United States to resume his academic career. He briefly taught at Prairie View A&M University before enrolling at Indiana University to attend graduate school.

Miles attended graduate school at Indiana University from 1958 to 1962. He was the recipient of a University Fellowship and a John Hay Whitney Opportunity Fellowship. His mentors at Indiana University included former APSA president Charles Hyneman. He earned both master’s and doctorate degrees from Indiana University. His dissertation addressed the origin and early developments of judicial review in 19th-century Indiana.

After earning his graduate degrees, Miles held teaching and research positions at Indiana University, Prairie View A&M University, and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In 1966, he accepted a tenure track position in the Political Science Department at San Diego State College (later renamed San Diego State University). When he arrived, he was the only African American professor on the faculty of the entire university.

Shortly after joining SDSU’s faculty, Miles received a National Science Foundation grant and a research grant from the San Diego College Foundation. He earned a distinguished teaching honor by the California State Colleges for the 1967–1968 academic year.

He was promoted quickly and soon became a leading figure in the department and the university, where he spent 32 years of his career. Working in close collaboration with his colleague Ned Joy, he helped build a strong academic program in public law, and developed courses including “Law and the Political System” and “The Supreme Court and Contemporary Issues” that continue to draw large numbers of students to this day. He regularly taught these courses along with other courses in public law and taught more widely in the subfield of American politics. His influence on SDSU’s political science department goes beyond these contributions. His deep commitment to human rights has had a lasting impact on the department’s research and teaching strengths in human rights across the subfields.

The high regard in which Miles was held at SDSU allowed him to play an important role when the Africana Studies Department was established. He became adviser, mentor and an integral source of support for its faculty, serving on some of their tenure and promotion committees and as a tireless advocate. Miles was mentor to more than one generation of colleagues in political science, Africana studies, and beyond. He made it his task to help newly hired faculty feel at home. In their remembrances of him, a number of faculty members refer to him as an exemplary colleague, teacher, scholar, and friend, whose judgment they trusted, and whose advice helped guide them. Famous for his understated way of speaking, Miles led by the strength of his example, his dedication, and his unwavering commitment to equality and justice for all. In his term as chair of the Department of Political Science, he secured its future by planning for the hire of a new generation of faculty members as the department was facing an impending spate of retirements. Its current members have his foresight and wisdom to thank for the orderly generational transition that took place soon after his retirement.

During his academic career, Miles coauthored Vital Issues of the Constitution and was a contributing author for Great Cases of the Supreme Court. He served on the editorial boards of various academic journals, including the Western Political Science Quarterly, National Political Science Review, American Review of Politics, and Journal of Politics. He also served on a committee of the College Board in order to make improvements to the Advanced Placement (AP) examination.

Miles was active in APSA. He served on various APSA committees, was a member of its Executive Council, and regularly served on panels at APSA conferences. APSA recognized Miles’s “excellence in scholarship and service to the profession” by awarding him a distinguished scholar award in 1985.

Miles worked tirelessly to eradicate barriers that prevented African Americans from entering the field of political science. For decades, he was affiliated with the APSA’s Committee on the Status of Blacks in the Profession and the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS). For the Committee on the Status of Blacks in the Profession, he served as chair. He also worked on a directory of Black Americans in political science. NCOBPS was his second home, where he regularly attended the organization’s annual conferences. He served on the editorial board of the National Political Science Review, the organization’s flagship journal.

Overall, Miles dedicated his career to the study of race and politics and the advancement of Blacks in the political science profession. In the Summer of 1983, he directed an APSA seminar called “The Constitution in Black America” that drew from his wide-ranging research and rich, scholarly dialogues with judicial experts in the field. A decade later, he advised political scientist Charles Hadley on his presidential address to the Southern Political Science Association. Later published in the Journal of Politics, the address urged political scientists to give acute attention to Blacks and southern politics. Hadley credits Miles for “provid[ing] the inspiration” for the article.

In addition to being personable and outgoing, Miles was a mentor and standard bearer for social justice. Shiela Harmon Martin, the former chair of the University of the District of Columbia’s Division of Social and Behavior Sciences, had fond memories of Miles. She stated that, “Dr. Miles was a great political scientist. His scholarship and activism paved the way for many Black political scientists.” She further stated that Miles was part of a Louisiana to Texas nexus of Black scholars, who were encouraged by Jewel Prestage to transform the political science discipline.

Miles’s political activism dates back to at least the period when he was a graduate student. As a graduate student, he was involved in a campaign to desegregate public facilities in Bloomington, Indiana. While employed as a professor at Prairie View A&M University, he helped organize a boycott around 1963 in Hempstead, Texas, that targeted businesses that practiced racial discrimination. While teaching at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in the mid-1960s, Miles fought to improve housing conditions for African Americans.

After settling into his position at SDSU, Miles continued his activism while living in California. He served as chairperson of the board for the San Diego Urban League in the 1980s. He was president of the ACLU for San Diego and Imperial Counties in the 1990s. He was also active in the ACLU at the national level by being a member of the ACLU’s national board for more than a decade.

Miles received numerous awards and accolades for his community service. He was presented with an APSA award for his “service to the profession”; he was the recipient of the Western Political Science Association’s “Scholar Teacher Activist” award; he was recognized for his contributions by the San Diego City Schools Board of Education; he received a special commendation from a San Diego City Councilmember; and he received the Fannie Lou Hamer community service award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. In 2017, Miles was recognized by the Urban League of San Diego County as an “Art of Change Honoree” for being one of “San Diego’s pioneers in civil rights and civic engagement.”

Miles’s academic and community service activities did not interfere with his ability to be a devoted family member. He spent considerable time with his wife and two sons, and his wife and sons recall fond memories of their time together. Miles was also very dedicated to his parents, siblings, nieces, and nephews. During his leisure time, Miles enjoyed reading, listening to jazz music, cooking, and playing racquetball.

Elijah Miles is survived by his wife of 62 years, Frances Miles; two sons, Christopher Miles (Donna) and Tony Miles (Maisha); a grandson, Brayden Miles; two sisters, Iola Taylor and Ella Lindsey (Larry); a brother, Edgar Miles (Ann); numerous nieces and nephews; and a host of friends and colleagues.

—Sekou Franklin, NCOBPS President, Middle Tennessee State University

—Farid Abdel-Nour, San Diego State University

—Tony Miles, son of Wally Miles

Kent Portney

Kent Portney passed away this past June, taken from us far too early. At the time of his death Kent was Bob Bullock Professor of Public Policy and Finance at the Bush School at Texas A&M University.

Kent grew up in New Jersey and would talk of his two childhood passions there: playing the cello and rooting for Philadelphia sports teams. He worked his way through Rutgers University, Camden College, and graduated from there in 1973. He then received an MA in public administration and public policy from the University of Connecticut in 1975 and used that degree to gain employment with the state of Connecticut, conducting policy evaluation related to the court system.

He missed academic life and quickly returned to school, enrolling in a PhD program at Florida State University. Kent was drawn to the legendary Tom Dye as he shared Dye’s passion for equality and he began his own research on the distributional impacts of public policy. In addition to learning how to become a political scientist, something else of importance happened at Florida State: there in Tallahassee he met the love of his life, Marilyn Santiesteban.

Kent received his degree in 1979 and began work at Tufts University that same year. He was hired to teach courses in public policy, quantitative methods, and judicial politics, and he also began a research program that focused on the environment and on cities. He turned out to be a prolific and highly respected scholar, writing or editing nine books while at Tufts. His coauthored book, The Rebirth of Urban Democracy (Brookings, 1993), a study of citizen participation programs in five American cities, won the American Political Science Association’s Gladys Kammerer Award for the best book published that year on American politics, as well as the Urban Politics Section’s best book award. His book Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously (MIT, 2003), became a standard work in the field.

Kent was also a talented methodologist and an experimental design program, Crime and Punishment (with Jerry Goldman), taught a generation of students about the biases built into the criminal justice system. It won both the Rowman & Littlefield Award for Innovative Teaching in Political Science and the APSA’s Best Instructional Software Award.

At Tufts, Kent became a popular teacher and he always managed to make his courses something full of laughter as well as full of learning. Maybe it was all the candy bars he gave away. He cared deeply about his students and he kept in touch with many of them over the years. He was also a leader at Tufts, serving as department chair in political science and as the head of countless university committees. He was particularly active in building up the University’s curriculum and programming on the environment. Working with four Tufts colleagues, he was responsible for a large National Science Foundation grant which created a major interdisciplinary research and teaching program on “Water Across Boundaries.”

In 2014, after more than 30 years at Tufts, Kent joined the faculty of the Department of Public Service and Administration in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. He brought to the Bush School the same zest for scholarly pursuits that had characterized his time at Tufts. In addition to holding the Bullock Chair, Kent directed the Bush School’s Institute of Science, Technology, and Public Policy (ISTPP). In 2016, he won the Bush School’s Faculty Excellence Award; the following year he was honored by the university as a Presidential Impact Fellow.

In Kent’s capacious corner office at the Bush School, the strains of classical music welcomed colleagues and students alike. And, as at Tufts, candy was ever-present. (His office also paid homage to the professional sports loyalties he had developed in Boston.) His office décor was what might be styled as “books and papers everywhere,” a testament to his active research agenda. Kent was a bridge-builder and he needed a large office to host meetings with colleagues from across the campus. Throughout his time at the Bush School, he was a partner in research teams exploring an array of issues related to the environment and natural resources. Recently these collaborative endeavors included the Resilience and Climate Change Cooperative Project with the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, the A&M Institute for Sustainable Communities, the Energy Institute’s Interdisciplinary Academic Council, the Food-Energy-Water Nexus Initiative Leadership Team, the Water Research Group, and the Hydrologic Science and Management Program in A&M’s College of Geoscience.

Intellectual curiosity defined Kent. His well-regarded book, Sustainability, which appeared in 2015, was published as part of the MIT Press’s “Essential Knowledge” series. The book’s exploration of the concept of sustainability is deep; the analysis of the politics associated with it is insightful. In his six years on the Bush School faculty, he was also author or coauthor of nearly 20 scholarly journal articles, reaching wide audiences in environmental politics, public policy, and urban politics.

Environmental policy and politics not only infused Kent’s research, it also was the focus of his Bush School courses: Environmental Policy and Management, Urban Sustainability, Water Policy and Management, and Science and Technology Policy. He was a popular instructor and his classes were often over-subscribed. Students valued his knowledge and his teaching style; he was an inspiration to students pursuing careers in environmental protection. The Bush School offers only master’s degrees, but Kent was in high demand as an outside member of doctoral committees in several different colleges at A&M. Even though these students’ PhDs were in other fields, he was a valuable mentor to them.

Beyond research and teaching, Kent was an excellent departmental citizen taking on various committee assignments with good cheer and smart work. One of his most important roles within the University was his service on the Council of Principal Investigators. His leadership of ISTPP was outstanding at a critical point in its development. Kent was also active in the profession, serving on numerous APSA section committees and on the editorial boards of Polity and Urban Science as well as being associate editor for Climate Change.

Kent is survived by Marilyn, his wife of nearly 40 years, his son Teddy and wife Jennie, his daughter Alexandra, his sister Arden and husband Vince, and three cats. A joyful celebration of Kent’s life, complete with chamber music, Boston sports memorabilia, and candy, was held on June 16, 2020. The attendees—those who were there in person and those who participated remotely—attested not only to Kent’s scholarship and wise counsel, but also to his genuine kindness and thoughtfulness, his delightful sense of humor, and his significant impact on them. Kent enriched the Bush School and there was widespread agreement that it will not be the same without him. And although it might seem a bit clichéd to say, “A life well lived, a man well loved,” in Kent Portney’s case it is the absolute truth.

—Jeffrey M. Berry, Tufts University

—Ann O’M. Bowman, Texas A&M University

John Schmidhauser

Dr. John R. Schmidhauser, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Southern California, died at his home in Santa Barbara in March 2018 at the age of 96. He was one of the foremost authorities in public law and judicial behavior in the United States. His contributions to the study of the Supreme Court and Congress are among the classics in the field.

Born in the Bronx, New York in 1922, he grew up during the Great Depression. After his father died, his mother raised him in Salisbury, Maryland. He served in the Navy (1941–1945) before attending the University of Delaware on the GI Bill. His doctorate is from the University of Virginia where he met his wife, Thelma Ficker, a doctoral student in botany. While a student, he played French horn and trumpet in bands.1

After he completed his graduate studies, he joined the faculty of the University of Iowa. He taught there from 1954 to 1973 during which he also served a term as Democratic Congressman for the first district in Iowa.2 He was proud of sponsoring legislation to protect worker safety.3 One of his doctoral students, Larry Berg, took a position at USC and then recruited him. They coauthored The Supreme Court and Congress: Conflict and Interaction 1945–1968 (The Free Press, 1972). At USC, he also served as department chair for 19 years. He played an important role in establishing the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics in the Department of Political Science and received the USC Raubenheimer Outstanding Faculty Award in 1991.4

A prolific scholar, Schmidhauser influenced the study of public law through his innovative research on judicial behavior, inter-branch relations, federalism, corruption, and comparative legal systems.5 His seminal work on judicial backgrounds inspired younger scholars to undertake behavioral studies of the judiciary.6 David O’Brien described his scholarship as providing a “collective portrait of those who have served on the bench.”7 He had broad interests, which included comparative judicial studies, and he created a specialized graduate seminar on this subject— Comparative Judicial Processes, Policies, and Behavior. One of his major contributions was an edited collection Comparative Judicial Systems: Challenging Frontiers in Conceptual and Empirical Analysis (London: Butterworths, 1987).8 For years he was actively involved in the Comparative Judicial Studies research group of the International Political Science Association. In addition to the originality and breadth of his research, Schmidhauser’s approach to scholarship was decades ahead of its time, pioneering in the creation of datasets that were then shared with other scholars. This practice laid a foundation for the modern study of the courts, set a standard for analytic transparency in the field, and marked the rigor and generosity of his work.

One of his graduate students, the late Joel Grossman admired his mentor for his innovative scholarship on judicial politics. He said: “His constitutional law casebook, among the first of its kind, encouraged students to consider how the court made its decisions as a way of understanding the meaning and impact of its formal opinions.” This book also inspired faculty to teach courses in judicial process.9

Another of his former students, Evan MacKenzie, professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle recalled that he was: “…an incredibly vigorous and principled man who could lecture for hours in an organized manner about public law scholarship and history, without using notes. I have rarely seen anything like it.” He was also a mentor of Dr. Joellen Allen, a leader associated with the Eagle Forum.

His scholarship on the political behavior of older persons was also pathbreaking. Graduate students worked with him on topics ranging from a behavioral analysis of the California Supreme Court to private convenants and public law.10 He also taught as a visiting professor at the University of Virginia, Simon Fraser University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

He was the devoted husband of Thelma to whom he was married for 66 years. At the time of his death, they had seven children, four grandchildren, and one grandchild. They lived in Inglewood for years before moving to Carpinteria.

Although he had a long commute, he made time to take colleagues to lunch every semester. He was a beloved mentor and supportive colleague who was admired by all who knew him. He is sorely missed.

—Alison Dundes Renteln, University of Southern California

—Jeb Barnes, University of Southern California

NOTES

1. http://www.coastalview.com/obituaries/john-richard-schmidhauser/article_b5d1be04-346a-11e8-9013-8fbe4bedc2ec.html

2. https://bioguideretro.congress.gov/HomeMemberDetails?memIndex=S000131

3. Supra, note 1.

4. https://news.usc.edu/138753/in-memoriam-social-scientist-john-rschmidhauser/

5. A list of his publications is available on the website of the Department of Political Science and International Relations at USC.

6. John R. Schmidhauser. 1979. Judges and Justices: The Federal Appellate Judiciary. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company; Henry J. Abraham. 1996. The Judiciary: The Supreme Court in the Governmental Process (10th ed.) New York: NYU Press, 102.

7. David M. O’Brien. 1988. Judicial Roulette: Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Judicial Selection. New York: Priority Press, 38–39.

8. Martin Shapiro. 1993. “Public Law and Judicial Politics.” In Ada W. Finifter (Ed.), Political Science: The State of the Discipline II (365–381). Washington, DC: American Political Science Association.

9. C. Herman Pritchett. 1968. “Public Law and Judicial Behavior.” In Marian D. Irish (Ed.), Political Science: Advance of the Discipline (190–219). Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 206.

10. Evan MacKenzie. 1994. Privatopia: homeowner association and the rise of residential governments. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Norman Schofield

Norman Schofield, a leading scholar of social choice theory, political economy, and multi-party electoral competition, passed away October 12, 2019 in St. Louis at the age of 75, in the company of his family. Norman was a professor in economics and in political science at Washington University in St. Louis for over 30 years. A giant in his field of study and an engine of intellectual ferment in our two departments, Norman will be greatly missed here. His passing offers a moment to assess his colorful career and its varied and interrelated impacts on the study of politics. A major proponent of the spatial theory of electoral competition, Norman is famous not only for his “chaos theorems” but also for his innovatively theory-motivated statistical analysis of party strategy, as well as a distinctive historical approach to interpreting the development of political institutions.

Born January 30, 1944 in Rothesay, on the Scottish Isle of Bute, Norman earned his first BS degree in physics at the University of Liverpool in 1965. He followed with another in mathematics in 1966. Those were heady days for other reasons too in Liverpool, and Norman and his wife Liz often spoke wistfully of their days following British rock and roll, including the Beatles and others at the storied Cavern Club. In 1969 they took up residence at the University of Essex, where Norman held a fellowship in mathematics. The following year he made the transition to political economy as lecturer in government from 1970 to 1976, part of a flowering of modern political science in Britain at that time centered at Essex. He officially took his PhD in government there in 1976, in keeping with the casual timing of the doctorate that was still common then in the British system. Norman and Liz relocated for the first time to the US 1976, where Norman served as associate professor ofgovernment at the University of Texas, Austin, for three years.

During those early years Norman began applying theoretical models of bargaining and of coalitions to problems of collective choice. His earliest works often phrased the problem as one of bargaining over international trade terms. This line of thinking led ultimately to Norman’s important general theoretical breakthroughs concerning instability in general processes of social choice, such as voting. In Norman’s terms, “instability” meant essentially that any outcome of voting or bargaining could in principle be overturned by some alternative outcome supported by some alternative winning coalition; and that moreover the process of such successive replacements could follow arbitrary continuous paths, and could cycle among any designated outcomes. The first publications displaying his sweepingly abstract analysis of collective choice processes, “Dynamic Games of Collective Action” and “Transitivity of Preferences on a Smooth Manifold,” appeared in 1977. They were followed in rapid succession by a series of papers advancing the notion that—except in extreme situations of rare, precise symmetry, or very low dimensionality, or high extraordinary-majority requirements, or a single heavily-weighted voter—collective choice processes alone would be incapable of aggregating individual preferences to yield a stable social choice. Moreover, the processes would be generically unstable; that is, even a carefully arranged combination of individual preferences that does yield stable social choice would, if slightly perturbed, almost surely lose that stability. These are the results Norman called “chaos theorems.” This work culminated in Norman’s 1986 “Structural Instability of the Core,” in collaboration with the other notable author of chaos theorems, Richard McKelvey, a paper that in a sense combined Schofield’s work showing instability with respect to arbitrarily small changes in the social choice with McKelvey’s results on large-move instability, and thus provided their unified statement of chaos.

Norman returned to Essex as reader ineconomics from 1979–86, taking the PhD in economics in 1985. For much of the 1980s he visited at California universities, first at the social science program of the California Institute of Technology during most of 1983–86 (the first year as Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar), and later at Stanford University as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1988–89. Between his California stays, Washington University was fortunate in 1986 to lure Norman as professor of economics and fellow of the Center in Political Economy. A year later he, Liz, and their children Tom, Isobel and Camilla moved into the home in historic Benton Place that would be the scene of many convivial dinners for political economy conference attendees over the years.

At Washington University, Norman completed the program of empirical research on coalition governments that he had begun back at Essex in collaboration with Michael Laver, and that eventually produced their influential 1990 book Multiparty Governments. Meanwhile, he made new theoretical advances in the 1990s that provided the foundation for a second, even more prolific round of empirical work, focusing centrally on multi-party electoral competition and ultimately on the broader problem of stability and change in political coalitions and political institutions. In contrast to his famous earlier work on instability, the new theoretical work addressed the sources of political stability.

First, Norman identified what he called the “heart” of a polity: a central region of policy alternatives from which, he showed, the governing parties were likely to choose. The instability demonstrated in the chaos theorems would mean, in principle, unpredictability. But here Norman developed and applied a powerful new insight: if political actors come to share corresponding expectations about how different seat disributions would result in particular coalition bargaining outcomes—and typical descriptions of politics indicate that they do—then their strategic problem in campaigning for election becomes more clearly defined, generating a statistical model suitable for data analysis. This insight allowed, for example, statistical tests to adjudicate between the hypothesis that parties choose platforms to maximize appeal to their supporters, versus maximizing the extent to which they will influence policy in the resulting government. This tradeoff between a party’s policy goals and its goal of winning offices in government reflects, in part, the conflicting demands on a party’s leaders to maintain support both among policy-motivated “party activists” and among the party’s rank-and-file supporters. Specific theoretical work on this dual-constituencies problem in multi-party competition led as well to illuminating insights about two-party politics, explored by Norman and colleague Gary Miller in a remarkable series of papers on the history of the shifting coalitional and ideological bases of the major American political parties since Civil War times.

A subsequent, related program in the empirical analysis of elections and government formation sprang from another Schofield theoretical advance. This work was based on a source of stability that can emerge because of candidates’ uncertainty in electoral competition: the so-called mean voter theorem, first identified by Melvin Hinich. Hinich had shown how, if parties’ knowledge of voter preferences is probabilistic, then parties competing to maximize their vote shares should converge in their platforms to the mean of voter ideal points. In that setting, under multi-party competition, Norman realized that a voter’s choice might not be a simple reflection of her perception of party intentions, but also of her wish to elect the party most effective in actually implementing desirable policies. This appeal through party effectiveness, which Norman associated with the more general political science idea of “valence,” might lie in the party’s past success in winning seats and thus its likely strong bargaining position in forming the ensuing government. A minor party, with low valence, cannot compete with a major party except by choosing a sharply distinct policy position; it is thus encouraged to advocate relatively extreme positions. In terms of game theory, the resulting strategic problem is a technically difficult subject. Moreover, previous analyses by other theorists had indicated that valence considerations are likely to exacerbate problems of social choice instability. Norman, however, worked out conditions for existence of equilibrium and methods for predicting the actions of extreme minor parties as well as major parties, further broadening the program of multi-party election analysis undertaken by him and many collaborators over the subsequent two decades and more. This second program of research is perhaps best illustrated by the theoretical and empirical analyses that comprise Norman’s 2006 book with Itai Sened, Multiparty Democracy: Elections and Legislative Politics. The two research programs together provided the outline for Norman’s long-running graduate seminars in political economy and in comparative electoral politics, in which numerous Washington University graduate students started their publication careers by coauthoring articles with Norman. Norman’s third major new theoretical insight into stability during those years led him to undertake a series of narrative, historically oriented analyses on institutional stability and change. Extending his suggestion about how common expectations about coalition bargaining outcomes could stabilize party competition, he argued that a coalescence around some “core beliefs” might create a stable outcome, analogous to the game-theoretic core but contingent on the content of players’ mutual expectations about one anothers’ actions. Attainment of such shared expectations can stabilize broader processes by which political systems make collective choices. In real politics, such core beliefs can often be described partly in terms of the theories of economics, ideological doctrines, or coalition-binding principles to which political actors subscribe. Norman used this intuition to give parallel accounts of several critical episodes of American history, ranging from independence to the postwar establishment of the Bretton Woods agreement. In each case, he described previously stable institutions upset by events, exacerbated by “prophets of chaos” who called into question, and thus destabilized, prior understandings. In each case, this presented leading political actors with a “quandary” that scrambled preexisting expectations and destabilized political interaction. In each historical episode, stability was eventually restored by “architects of order” whose proposals of a new understanding gained sway and underpinned a new institutional stability. The work eventually produced Norman’s 2006 book Architects of Political Change: Constitutional Quandaries and Social Choice Theory, a fascinating outlier from his more typical quantitative and formally deductive efforts, in terms of both subject of analysis and mode of expression.

Norman wrote over 80 articles published in refereed journals, contributed another 80 to edited volumes, and wrote or co-wrote seven scholarly books and three textbooks. He edited or coedited 14 volumes of collected papers. He was honored with a variety of prizes and fellowships, including a Fulbright Distinguished Chair at Humboldt University in 2002–03; honorary doctorates from University of Liverpool in 1986 and the University of Caen in 1991; and designation as Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.

In addition to his research accomplishments, Norman enthusiastically fosterered international collaboration by organizing conferences in diverse locales including Baku, Barcelona, Cancun, Caen, Fiesole, Oaxaca, and Turin. Through these conferences as well as his frequent travel to present invited lectures, Norman maintained a worldwide circle of professional friends and colleagues. The conferences often enabled him to afford graduate students the opportunity to present their early research projects to the widest possible audiences.

Here at home, Norman was a major administrative influence on the development of political economy at Washington University. In 1990, he succeeded Douglass North as director of the Center in Political Economy. Through the Center, Norman brought several notable postdoctoral fellows to St. Louis, including Alastair Smith, who became assistant professor here and later chair of politics at New York University; and Itai Sened, who eventually became chair at Washington University. He presided over a long-running series of annual political economy conferences that brought former Washington University colleagues, new young talent in the field, and many of Norman’s far-flung academic friends together in St. Louis. During the 1990s, Norman instituted an MA program in political economy, and the students he mentored there included several who have gone on to academic political science careers. In 1991, Norman was installed as William Taussig Professor of Political Economy; in 1996 he was appointed jointly as professor of political science, where he eventually moved his primary appointment.

When Norman stepped down as director of the Center in 2012, his close colleagues Maggie Penn and John Patty seized the moment to honor Norman in the manner most fitting: a conference in his honor. Friends and colleagues from far and wide joined us in April 2013 to present a variety of recent work, both drawing on approaches Norman had pioneered and advancing research programs derived in part from his. In keeping with tradition, Norman and Liz hosted attendees at Benton Place the evening before the conference.

—Randall Calvert, Washington University in St. Louis

Dean Yarwood

Dean Lesley Yarwood, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Missouri, passed away in Kansas City, Missouri, on June 15, 2020. Dean served on the faculty at the University of Missouri, Columbia, for 33 years. His teaching and scholarship centered on public administration and public policy. Dean’s professional life was exemplified by his love of knowledge. During his career, he valued training undergraduate and graduate students and mentoring junior faculty.

Dean was born in Decorah, Iowa, on March 17, 1935. While attending Decorah High School, Dean met his soulmate, Elaine Bender. They married September 2, 1956. Dean’s vocation was always education. He attended the University of Iowa, receiving a BA in history in 1957. Following graduation, Dean taught social studies for two years at the Mid-Prairie Community School District in Wellman, Iowa. With a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, he began graduate study at Cornell University, earning an MA in 1961. He continued his graduate studies at the University of Illinois, receiving a James Garner Fellowship and a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship, and earning a PhD in 1966. Dean served as an assistant professor at Coe College from 1963 to 1966 and at the University of Kentucky from 1966 to 1967.

Dean joined the Department of Political Science at the University of Missouri in 1967. Throughout his career, he valued the missions of both undergraduate teaching and academic research. He chaired the Department of Political Science twice, from 1988– 1991 and 1998–1999. Dean was named the Frederick A. Middlebush Professor in Political Science from 1992 to 1995. His willingness to serve is exemplified when he later filled in the role of Director of Graduate Studies for a year to help a newly-elected chair when other

suitable candidates were unavailable. Dean Yarwood published numerous articles and chapters in the fields of public administration, public policy, and American politics. His edited books include The National Administrative System: Selected Readings and Public Administration, Politics, and the People: Selected Readings for Managers, Employees, and Citizens. For his final book, When Congress Makes a Joke: Congressional Humor Then and Now, Dean interviewed Representatives and Senators from former Minority Leader Bob Dole to a then-incarcerated Jim Traficant on the role of humor in the legislative process. Humor serves as political communication and may fulfill important functions for political organizations. Former MU department chair John Petrocik notes that “Dean’s commitment to scholarship does merit respect and the department benefitted from his commitment to its welfare. He merits celebration for both of those matters.” Dean was truly devoted to his students’ education, but with an old-school manner. He believed that, in class, undergraduates should be called on by their last names only. His students often first found him stodgy, but they soon learned that Dean was fair, kind, and witty. Professional decorum, for Dean, was a means to preserve equality and opportunity for all students. Maintaining a sense of being nice, respectful, and modest would allow students and those around him to enhance their experiences and improve their talents.

Dean also mentored junior faculty in a kind and quiet way. He was always careful not to hurt feelings even when he wanted to say “what were you thinking!” For instance, as an assistant professor going up for tenure, Birol Yeşilada had the great idea of cheering up his stale department office by putting empty wine bottles on the office window sill facing the parking lot behind the professional building. Dean came into the office from across the hall and in a low voice said “Birol, those look nice but you are going up for tenure, and a parent of a student looking up from outside might not think so.” Birol took the bottles down and put them into a box, only for his wife Sue to come over and say “now you look like a wino.” In a masterful appeasement, Birol decided to display the empty bottles on a bookshelf with a label “Fine Wines of the World.” Dean came over to talk about something, sat down, and was pleased to see there were no bottles on the window sill. But when he got up to leave, Dean turned around and saw the bottles on the shelf. At first, he turned red and said nothing. After Dean read the label he chuckled and said “you son of a gun.”

There were so many times Dean helped each of us. He was that kind of a guy. New chairs, for instance, would be given a short piece by Aaron Wildavsky published in PS with suggestions on how to be an effective chair, and he would offer his own advice. James Endersby remembers the Yarwood triple: if Dean had something important to communicate, he would drop by for a personal conversation to share his thoughts. The next day, Dean would visit or call again to discuss the topic further. Within the week, he would make one more contact just to make sure you understood his perspective and, in the rare case of disagreement, he understood your point of view. If Dean raised a new topic, you naturally expected two more conversations about it over the next several days. In all of these cherished memories, we are grateful for Dean’s unwavering support.

Following retirement, Dean volunteered for the Mizzou Alumni Association, greeting prospective students, their families, and visitors to the University. As his and Elaine’s health began to decline, they moved to Kansas City to be closer to family. Dean was devoted to his family. His wife Elaine preceded him in death on April 1, 2020. He is survived by his daughter Lucinda (Snider), sons Kent, Keith, Douglas, and Dennis, five grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and a host of other close family members. The Dean L. Yarwood Political Science Scholarship was established at the University of Missouri in his honor. Dean Yarwood holds a special place in our hearts, and he will be truly missed.

—James Endersby, University of Missouri

—Lael Keiser, University of Missouri

—Birol Yesilada, Portland State University