With the passing of Frances McCall Rosenbluth on November 20, 2021, the profession has lost a brilliant scholar, a powerful advocate for gender equality, a beloved mentor, and a warm and generous colleague. Rosenbluth was one of the first and most prominent women in the fields of comparative political economy and rational choice approaches to the study of politics. She used her stature to lift others up, and contributed enormous time and energy to promoting excellence in the discipline of political science.
As a scholar, Rosenbluth took on a breathtakingly wide range of subjects—Japanese political economy, the politics of gender, war and politics, and most recently, the contemporary crisis of democratic institutions in advanced economies. She produced seven books, three edited volumes, and more than 40 articles and chapters. She earned multiple awards, including APSA’s Victoria Schuck Award for the best book on women and politics which she won in 2012 with co-author Torben Iversen. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007 and was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2011.
Rosenbluth was born in Osaka and grew up in Japan and Taiwan. While aware of the importance of national cultures, histories, and social norms to politics, at heart she was a rationalist who maintained that people respond to incentive structures embedded in political and economic institutions, and that they change social relations through bargaining and threats of exit.
Rosenbluth’s early work centered on the study of Japanese politics and political economy. Her first book, Financial Politics in Contemporary Japan (1989), challenged the conventional wisdom that Japan’s culture was unique and that theoretical approaches used in the rest of the world did not apply. She also showed, according to her obituary in the Yale Daily News, that “the Japanese economy was neither as efficient nor as viable as it appeared to most commentators. These innovations quickly established her as a leader in the field.”
Her 1993 co-authored book, Japan’s Political Marketplace, overturned the prevailing view that Japanese politics was beholden to its bureaucrats, and did so by supplying an inventory of the subtle but effective ways that politicians control bureaucrats. As Amy Catalinac of NYU recalls, publication of the book marked “a watershed moment in research on Japanese politics.” Rosenbluth also tackled the reasons behind Japan’s chronic low fertility. She argued that fertility decline there and in other advanced democracies was not a sign of women’s progress, as some feminists had maintained, but rather proof of women’s exclusion from the labor market.
Rosenbluth was a towering figure in the study of the political economy of gender, an area of research that she channeled in her legendary undergraduate course “Sex, Markets, and Power.” Her theory of gender equality forged a creative rapprochement between difference feminism and liberal feminism. She believed that many women want families, but that when women devote all their time to care work, they have little potential to exit hierarchical and abusive family relations. Wage work in the labor market—and career success—gives women the resources they need to bargain for egalitarian conditions at home, at work, and in society generally. At a small dinner at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that launched discussions leading to the Daedalus special issue on women’s equality, Rosenbluth noted, “I’m a Virginia Woolf feminist. Women need a room of their own and 500 pounds.”
In her epic Women, Work, and Politics (2010) which she co-authored with Iversen, Rosenbluth argues that women politicians could make easier inroads into political office in party-centered, list-based electoral systems than in majoritarian, candidate-centered systems. As in the economy more generally, women do better in institutional contexts that are less punitive toward people who interrupt their careers to raise families. Iversen recalls that "Frances was a brilliant scholar who possessed one of the rarest of qualities: the ability to condense deep knowledge about particular cases into striking theoretical insights."
Rosenbluth’s work with John Ferejohn was enormously influential. Their book, Forged Through Fire: War, Peace, and the Democratic Bargain (2016), operates on a vast canvas, tracing the interplay between war and democracy across space and time. They hatched the collaboration while touring an exhibit of 16th century Japanese artifacts, and over many years tested their ideas by organizing conferences with historians of diverse eras from ancient China to Renaissance Italy, among others. Ferejohn credits Rosenbluth for guiding the process: "I cannot say enough about how effective and persistent Frances was in keeping our eyes on the kinds of generalizations we were seeking and insisting that the historians react to them (brutally if they thought it necessary— some did). I came away amazed at her combination of enthusiasm, eagerness to find answers, flexibility in her approach and, at the end of the day, wisdom."
Her most recent book, Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy From Itself (2018), which was co-authored with her partner and colleague Ian Shapiro, argues that the decentralization of institutional power has contributed to contemporary democratic crises around the world. Far from generating greater representation, the devolution of power has done the opposite. Parties are no longer able to aggregate citizen interests and develop long-term policy responses to today’s pressing problems. Democracies around the world need stronger, disciplined, hierarchical parties, not parties that claim to be inclusive but respond primarily to polls and activists.
Many of us came to know Rosenbluth through the leadership role she played in advancing the interests of women in the profession. At Yale, she served as a mentor to dozens of women within the department and advocated gender equity in faculty hiring. As advisor on more than 40 dissertation committees, Rosenbluth helped students succeed. LaiYee Leong, a student from the early 2000s, remembers that her own long absence from New Haven “did not affect the regularity and attention with which Frances checked in with me (via email and phone calls) to keep me on track.” Rosenbluth understood that the road to academic success could be circuitous, especially for women, and she supported her students on the path they chose.
As deputy provost for faculty development, Rosenbluth worked to help people balance family and career, including by advocating for an early childhood learning center for scholars working in Yale’s laboratories. She brought her ideas and commitment to work-life policies to all the organizations she worked with. The President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, David Oxtoby, describes her as a “thoughtful leader” within the Academy and notes that “she inspired all through her example.”
In her work with APSA she led with a light touch—sharing the spotlight and drawing others into leadership roles by example and by invitation. She didn’t micromanage but inspired and empowered others to contribute to the collective. Former APSA president Jane Mansbridge remembers Rosenbluth not just as “an extraordinary political scientist, but also as an extraordinarily hard worker in the cause of women, particularly women in our profession.” Along with Mala Htun, Rosenbluth co-chaired Kathleen Thelen’s presidential task force on Women’s Advancement in the Profession. Among other APSA projects, Rosenbluth contributed countless hours to the construction of an APSA database, the Project on Women and Minorities, or P-WAM, which tracks their progress through the career pipeline to locate more precisely the impediments to diversity in political science.
Some will remember Rosenbluth for her scholarly accomplishments and the institutions she built. But what made her truly extraordinary was her character—warm, generous, inclusive, always gracious, totally relaxed, completely unflappable. She had a wonderful sense of self-irony, a self-deprecating wit, and a slightly mischievous laugh. A devoted mother, partner, and friend, Rosenbluth mixed public and private lives in ways that set her as a role model for everyone. She remained an extraordinarily productive scholar while preserving time for things that matter. She taught us how to learn and how to live.■
