David C. Leege was a quadruple threat—an outstanding scholar, prodigious institution builder, caring teacher/mentor, and brilliant critic. His death on November 20, 2021 at age 84 is greatly mourned by family, friends, students and the discipline which he did so much to advance.
His scholarship reflected his central concerns as a political scientist, an active participant in religious life, and a citizen fascinated by politics. His 1974 book with Wayne Francis, Political Research, was a rare methods text featuring a strong foundation in philosophy of science, empirical theory, and exposition of statistical techniques. The Notre Dame Study of Catholic Parish Life, which he co-directed from 1983-99 and for which he wrote many reports, offered a model of how to combine first-rate survey research with qualitative investigation to study America’s largest religious denomination. It produced a popular book and a dataset that young political scientists continue to exploit to better understand how religious cues influence political behavior.
As religious forces became increasingly important in American politics during the 1970s and after, Leege turned his attention to that topic. Concerned that the American National Election Studies (ANES), were inadequate to assess this new development, he spearheaded an effort to improve the measurement of religious factors in political behavior. He assembled a team of scholars that provided the ANES leadership with new survey items and helped get them added to the 1989 ANES pilot survey and, in time, become standard items used to assess religious influence on voting. He educated the user community about these new resources in a volume coedited with Lyman Kellstedt, Rediscovering the Religious Factor in American Politics (1993). The collection particularly influenced graduate students and young scholars.
His final book, The Politics of Cultural Differences, published in 2002 by Princeton University Press, was co-authored with Kenneth Wald, Paul Mueller and Brian Krueger. As lead author, he offered a theory of how cultural differences are mobilized in electoral politics that went far beyond simplistic “culture war” models and attracted considerable attention from scholars, consultants and journalists. It received the American Political Science Association’s inaugural award for the best book on religion and politics. The major finding that partisan elites often weaponize cultural differences—including but not limited to religion—in the quest for political supremacy remains supremely relevant years later. Through this work and numerous scholarly publications, he reinforced the message that empirical work on religion and political behavior should draw on and contribute to core theories of our discipline.
Beyond his scholarship, David illustrated the importance of service to scholarly institutions ranging from his home department to national and international organizations. At the University of Notre Dame where he taught from 1976-2003, he occupied numerous roles. In what he called his most challenging assignment, he was asked to raise the intellectual profile of the university by assembling new research and graduate study teams, providing them with research support, and thus building new areas of doctoral strength in the social sciences, humanities, and related professions. He also helped diversify the Notre Dame graduate student population by identifying and recruiting promising young scholars from underrepresented groups and developing policies to enhance their careers. He was proud of his stewardship of the Hesburgh Program in Public Service in which Notre Dame students spent a semester and often a summer on (paid) assignment with a government agency. The graduates of the program, he reported, blossomed into some of Washington’s brightest journalists, policy analysts and party leaders, comporting themselves with high ethical standards.
His service was not confined to Notre Dame. Having built survey research centers at several institutions and helped construct the centralized data archive at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, he was appointed program director for political science in 1974 at the National Science Foundation. Working with Warren Miller, he helped transform the University of Michigan’s biennial election study into a national resource by recruiting study directors from across the country, building a diverse board of overseers, and opening up the design of the survey to the entire user community. To facilitate this, he persuaded NSF to increase both the budget and the time frame for the grant, allowing long-range planning and pilot studies. He remained active in NES after leaving NSF, joining the Board of Overseers and promoting the inclusion of cultural variables on NES surveys.
Leege also helped leverage the power of the national election study organizations around the globe. After an initial meeting of about a dozen such institutions, he helped plan a cooperative organization that developed a pool of common survey items that appeared on post-election surveys. More than fifty institutions now work together in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems.
His other major service project, The Cambridge Studies in Politics, Religion and Social Theory, reflected his commitment to integrating research on religion with theoretical currents in the study of politics. The series has published more than thirty books by distinguished senior scholars as well as mid-level and emerging scholars. Several books have won major awards and become the agenda-setters that he hoped the still-flourishing series would produce.
Despite his administrative commitments, David never forgot that he was at base a teacher and mentor. One former undergraduate referred to his contagious “zest for learning” and another former undergraduate, who obtained a political science doctorate, described that enthusiasm: “He seemed so genuinely happy to be there around the table talking with us about religion and politics. He was patient and kind, and though he was so immensely knowledgeable about the subject, he interacted with my classmates and me in a way that signaled that he valued and was very interested in what we had to say.” Little wonder that Notre Dame gave him awards for teaching excellence and recognized his contributions to improving the graduate program. Similar tributes have come from his professional colleagues around the country.
David was also a brilliant critic. Those who worked with him were often astonished by the breadth of his knowledge across multiple domains. That made him an excellent—if challenging—manuscript reviewer. A member of the religion and politics community once quipped that most scholars in the subfield only prayed when they heard that Dave Leege (and this author) were reviewing their work for publication. Dave was willing to confront senior scholars to improve their work but lavished even more attention on counseling junior scholars to advance their careers whether they were Notre Dame students or not.
As a long-time friend and collaborator, I can say that Dave was warm, caring, hospitable, and often hilarious. In long conversations after his retirement, I learned about his deep faith, his family background, and his absolute admiration for his wife of 58 years, Pat. He cherished his three accomplished children—David M., Lissa, and Kurt and their spouses. He adored his five grandchildren and worried a lot about the world they would inherit.
Dave anticipated a reunion in heaven with his parents, sister Catherine, and brother Philip. For those of us who loved, admired and respected him, the world was much better for his presence and is a less kind and caring place without him in it.■
