Herbert McClosky, professor of political science emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, died on March 13, 2006, of pneumonia and complications of Parkinson's disease in Oakland, California. He was 89 years old.

McClosky was a pioneer researcher in the empirical study of political beliefs, attitudes, and ideologies through the use of survey instruments. From 1960 until shortly before his death, he was a major force in the work of Berkeley's Survey Research Center, and the program of political behavior he established as a graduate teaching field in Berkeley's political science department populated the entire profession of political science with a great many of the nation's leading academic specialists in the study of public opinion and attitude measurement.

McClosky's own research included two major books, Dimensions of Tolerance: What Americans Believe About Civil Liberties (with Alida Brill, 1983), and The American Ethos: Public Attitudes Toward Capitalism and Democracy (with John Zaller, 1984), and a large number of articles written over the last half-century that are still cited and relied upon by contemporary researchers to set the agenda for current empirical research on the beliefs and ideologies of American elites and ordinary citizens. One of these articles, “Consensus and Ideology in American Politics,” was recently identified as the 13th most cited American Political Science Review article since 1945. He also wrote a major text on the Soviet Union, The Soviet Dictatorship (with John E. Turner, 1960), and Political Inquiry (1969), an introductory book on research methods.

Herbert McClosky was born in a working-class area of Newark, New Jersey on September 18, 1916. Neither of his parents was educated beyond the beginnings of high school. The family (Herbert had two younger siblings) lived above a candy store and soda fountain where Herbert worked as a little boy, operating the fountain from a perch atop a wooden box. There was no indoor bathroom and the children of the family slept in the kitchen. Herbert's sparkling intelligence and broad curiosity manifested itself at an early age, however, and economic disadvantages were not sufficient to hold him back from notable success in his early schooling. The only academic setbacks McClosky ever suffered from kindergarten through his Ph.D. years came in high school, when he concentrated on developing his considerable skills as a baseball player. Even after his father's health faltered, his intellectual performance continued to excel. McClosky worked his way through the then-private University of Newark (now Rutgers-Newark), studying economic history, political philosophy, and comparative government in the mornings and holding down jobs for the rest of the day to contribute to the support of his family. He then repeated his academic success in graduate work at the University of Minnesota (Ph.D., 1946), where his teaching in the humanities program and in political science as a very junior member of the faculty was widely admired for its vitality and range.

At Minnesota, the McCloskys made close life-long friendships with the novelists Saul Bellow and Isaac Rosenfeld, and Herbert joined the brain trust that the young mayor Hubert Humphrey gathered about him in the course of consolidating the Minnesota Democratic and Farmer-Labor parties and ridding the municipal government of Minneapolis of corruption, anti-Semitism, racial prejudice, and communist influences. Meanwhile, McClosky gravitated toward the world-famous cluster of social psychologists that then taught on the Minneapolis campus. With characteristic energy, and with the help of a multi-year SSRC training grant, McClosky supplemented his doctoral education as a political philosopher and student of comparative political systems with a rigorous course of post-doctoral training in social psychology, psychometrics, and survey research, working especially closely with Paul Meehl. From the mid-1950s onward, a hallmark of McClosky's work was the design and application of elaborate survey instruments to the study of political attitudes and their foundations in core ideological beliefs. After an immensely productive two decades at Minnesota, McClosky moved to Berkeley where he set up his influential program of teaching and research in behavioral political science.

Living in Berkeley reunited McClosky with the beloved Giants of his childhood and he was also able to indulge his passion for excellence in early music, architecture, exotic cuisine, movies, and professional sports. McClosky's esthetic judgments in these and other matters were famously discerning, and famously immoveable. Those students and colleagues not daunted by his erudition and the speed with which he came to the heart of things frequently found his opinions penetrating and illuminating. This was also true of his professional judgments about politics and political science. He was a rock-solid New Deal liberal in politics, and a strong civil libertarian, loyal to his working-class and Jewish roots, never in the slightest thrown off-course by the Berkeley radical atmosphere. Professionally he was a force advocating modern modes of inquiry in political science whose advocacy was backed by solid achievement in empirical research. He was completely indifferent to honors, but was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was also a vice president of the American Political Science Association, and a member of the stellar first class of Fellows at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He was director of two major research programs of the Russell Sage Foundation of New York and was an active member of the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council. On his retirement from Berkeley he received the Berkeley Citation for notable professional achievement and service to the university.

McClosky is survived by his wife Mildred (Mitzi) of 64 years, his daughter Jane Greco of San Jose and her husband Richard Greco, his son Dan McClosky and wife Nan Toder of Oakland, his brother Gerald McClosky of Fortuna, California, and five grandchildren, Karine and David McClosky, Marc Weber, and Jonathan and Michael Greco.