Sven Steinmo, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado, passed away unexpectedly in July due to a rapid development of ALS. Political science, and the social sciences in general, have lost an extraordinary scholar, a great teacher, an admired mentor, and a beloved colleague. Steinmo was a leading scholar in establishing what became known as historical institutionalism in the discipline and played a decisive role in developing this approach.
Sven Steinmo was born in 1953 in Minnesota, to parents who had just emigrated from Norway. His first language was Norwegian, and he always remained attached to his Scandinavian “Viking” roots. After receiving his BA from the University of California Santa Cruz in 1976, Steinmo moved to Norway to work on an oil platform in the North Sea. His experience there sparked a life-long interest in comparative politics. This interest led him to the graduate program in political science at University of California-Berkeley, where he took the advice given to him by Aaron Wildavsky, to “take a comparative look at taxation.” The result earned Sven APSA’s highest award for a dissertation in comparative politics (the Gabriel Almond Award). It also resulted in his first book, Taxation and Democracy: Swedish, British and American Approaches to Financing the Modern State, published by Yale University Press in 1993. In this book, a comparison of the politics of taxation in Sweden, the UK and USA covering nearly a century, Steinmo coined the term “historical institutionalism.” It received the William Riker Award for the Best Book in Political Economy by the APSA in 1993.
At this time, the social sciences were for the most part divided between individualist behavioral approaches and various forms of structuralism such as Marxism and modernization theory. Steinmo found that these approaches could not explain the cross-national differences in taxation policy he was observing; instead what mattered were the political institutions (especially the electoral systems and the political role of the courts) that accounted for variation in tax policy. While this seems obvious today, focusing on the role of institutions in comparative politics was a bold and important departure at the time. A breakthrough for historical institutionalism as an approach came after Sven, then an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, brought a group of then “young and promising” scholars together with senior colleagues in Boulder for an intense two day meeting. The result was the co-edited volume, Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 1992). Measured by the number of citations, this book has had a major impact in the field of comparative politics. It has been reprinted four times and the introduction to the book has been translated into many languages.
In several subsequent books, Sven developed and refined the historical institutionalist approach. These include the co-edited volumes Growing Apart? America and Europe in the 21st Century (Cambridge University Press 2008), and The Leap of Faith: The Fiscal Foundations of Successful Government in Europe and America (Oxford University Press 2018). It includes as well his influential monograph The Evolution of Modern States: Sweden, Japan and the United States (Cambridge University Press 2010), which won the Gunnar Myrdal Prize in 2011.
In 2007, his academic career took a new turn as he accepted a Chair at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. There, he began to wonder why citizens’ attitudes toward taxation in the high-trust societies of Scandinavia seemed so different from those in his new home in Italy. Always driven by compelling research questions rather than wedded to a particular method, this time Sven turned to experimental methods to address this puzzle. Based on five years of generous funding from the European Union, the result was a co-authored book Willing to Pay: A Reasonable Choice Approach (Oxford University Press 2022).
Sven Steinmo was not an “armchair” comparativist. His scholarship was deeply influenced by the long periods he lived and worked in other countries. As he put it in an interview: “I honestly believe that every one of those experiences, whether in Japan, Norway, Sweden, Britain, or Italy, has helped me better understand other societies, and also my own country, the United States.” All in all, Steinmo has published eight books and the database Web of Science counts thirty published articles in scholarly journals. At the time of his death, Sven had been working on a new book, under contract with Yale University Press, titled America Divided: Why Americans Love Their Country and Hate Their Government. The manuscript, almost complete when he passed away, will be finished by one of his close collaborators for posthumous publication.
Sven Steinmo will be remembered for his many important scholarly achievements. But he was also something of a renaissance person. He was a skilled carpenter who built his own Norwegian style cabin (aka “hytte”) in the Rocky Mountains, a superb downhill skier, and an avid fisherman. He was a devoted husband, a loving father and grandfather, and a tremendously good friend with a huge laugh, a wonderful sense of humor, and a special feel for the many ironic situations that we experience in this world, not least in this profession. He will be remembered for his boundless energy, his passion for politics, and the exuberance and joy with which he lived his life. He will be dearly missed by his many friends, colleagues, former students and of course his family.
Those who did not know him can get a glimpse of his wonderful, winning personality in this short clip: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2308961689403496.
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