Paul R. Abramson
Paul R. Abramson, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Michigan State University, died in his sleep on February 12, 2018. Born in St. Louis, MO on November 28, 1937, Paul graduated from Washington University in St. Louis as a part of Phi Beta Kappa. He then attended the University of California at Berkeley from 1959 to 1960 as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. He served as a lieutenant in the US Army from 1960 to 1962 and was promoted to captain in the US Army Reserves in 1966 shortly before being honorably discharged.
Paul joined the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University in 1967, was promoted to associate professor in 1971 and to professor in 1977. Paul spent his entire career at Michigan State University, although he spent time as a senior Fulbright Scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1987 to 1988 and a Lady Davis Fellow from October 1994 through January 1995. While at the Hebrew University he became a close friend of Abraham Diskin and they subsequently coauthored four journal articles.
Paul authored Generational Change in American Politics (1975), The Political Socialization of Black Americans (1977), Political Attitudes in America (1983), Politics in the Bible (2012), and David’s Politics (2016). He also coauthored Value Change in Global Perspective (1995) with Ronald Inglehart and a series of 18 books on US presidential and congressional elections, the most recent of which was Change and Continuity in the 2012 and 2014 Elections coauthored with John H. Aldrich, Brad T. Gomez, and David W. Rohde.
In addition to these books, Paul authored five encyclopedia entries and authored or coauthored six book chapters. He also authored or coauthored 73 journal articles, 13 of which are in the American Political Science Review. Four of these APSR articles were single authored, three were coauthored with Ronald Inglehart, and three were coauthored with me. In addition, Paul published a widely cited article on the decline of electoral participation with Aldrich as well as an article on strategic voting in the 1988 presidential primaries with Aldrich, Phil Paolino, and Rohde. Finally, he published an APSR article on turnout with Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver.
These APSR coauthors worked with Paul on other articles as well. For example, he coauthored two articles in the American Journal of Political Science with Inglehart and one in the Journal of Politics. They also contributed articles to Comparative Political Studies and, in addition, they coauthored one book chapter. He coauthored an article with Ostrom in the Public Opinion Quarterly and one in the Presidential Studies Quarterly. Along with Aldrich, he published two chapters in the Elections in Israel series edited by Asher Arian and Michal Shamir. And along with Aldrich and Rohde he contributed to The Oxford Handbook of American Elections edited by Jan E. Leighley, Abramson, Aldrich, and Rohde. Abramson also coauthored an article with Paolino in the Political Science Quarterly and the Political Research Quarterly. Abramson, Aldrich, and Rohde also contributed an article to The Forum. Along with Anderson and Silver he coauthored three articles in the Public Opinion Quarterly and one in the American Journal of Political Science. His most frequent coauthors were Inglehart, Aldrich, and Rohde. In addition to his APSR coauthors, he coauthored five JOP articles with William Claggett as well as one article in the Political Research Quarterly. Two of his coauthors predeceased him: Cleo H. Cherryholmes (Teaching Political Science) and Ada W. Finifter (AJPS and POQ).
Paul’s publication record can easily be summarized, but many aspects of his personality are intangible. I recall that when John Aldrich was an assistant professor he mentioned that he had made an offer to buy a house in East Lansing, MI. Paul said that was a bad idea since owning a house meant home and yard maintenance. He estimated that this would cost half an article a year. John ignored Paul’s advice and later went on to purchase houses in East Lansing, Minneapolis, and Durham, NC. Paul later wrote a widely read but little cited article evaluating the potential of scientific remote viewing as a research method (AJPS April 1997). Paul cared a great deal about his teaching. In his West European Politics course, he used tapes to play the national anthems of Britain, France, and Germany. Later he would play scenes from movies in which these anthems were sung (The Bridge on the River Kwai, La Grande Illusion, Casablanca, and Europa, Europa).
Paul loved fine food and wine. On our first trip to Paris in 1999, my wife Candy and I arrived on the same flight as Paul and his wife Janet. We shared two meals with them. One was at the Chez Maître Paul which has since closed. The other was at the Benoit which was and remains a one-star restaurant. Paul and Candy both had the cassoulet and we shared a bottle and a magnum of Bordeaux. On their trips to France, Paul and Janet would try to dine at three-star restaurants. One year they took the Train à Grande Vitesse to Lyon to dine at the Paul Bocuse.
Paul is survived by Janet, his wife of 51 years, by his daughter Heather Krasna, his son-in-law Stuart Krasna, and his granddaughter Elizabeth Maybelle Krasna. He was predeceased by his son Lee who was diagnosed with ALS in February 2005 and who died on January 20, 2016. Donations in Paul’s memory should be sent to the Rabbi Morton and Aviva Hoffman Tzdekah Fund, Congregation Shaarey Zedek, 1924 Coolidge Road, East Lansing, MI 48823, www.shaareyzedek.com, or to the ALS Therapy Development Institute, www.als.net, 300 Technology Square, Suite 400, Cambridge, MA 02139.
—Charles Ostrom, Michigan State University
Thomas M. Carsey
Thomas M. Carsey, Thomas J. Pearsall Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, died on February 21, 2018 at his home in Durham, NC after a stubbornly determined fight with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Tom was an outstanding scholar, making major contributions to multiple areas of research on American politics and quantitative methods, publishing in every major journal in political science and with prestigious university presses, and winning multiple research awards. He was an exemplary disciplinary citizen, serving as an association president, an institute director, a journal editor, and in countless other service roles. He was an excellent teacher, winning multiple awards for his instruction. Most of all, however, Tom was known as one of the best mentors, colleagues, friends, and all-around human beings the discipline of political science has known.
Born in Omaha, Nebraska on January 20, 1966, Tom earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Wayne State College in Nebraska, where he met his best friend and the love of his life, Dawn, whom he married in 1988. He earned his PhD in political science from Indiana University in 1995. From there, Tom taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1995 to 2000, at Florida State University from 2000 to 2006, and at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill from 2006–18. At UNC, he also served as the director of the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science from 2011 to 2017. Tom is survived by his wife Dawn, their children Simon and Jane, his parents Dennis and Marsha, his sister Vicki, his brother Bob, and countless other family, friends, and loved ones.
If you asked him about his research interests, Tom—in his typical self-effacing style—would tell you he was a jack of all trades, master of none. Nothing, of course, could have been further from the truth. Tom had broad research interests and published in a variety of subfields, but his work made important contributions in all those fields. Nearly all his scholarship was defined by an abiding interest in representation: how the behavior of the mass public and the decisions of government elites are connected and shape each other. Tom studied this relationship with great aplomb in a variety of different contexts.
Tom’s prowess as a researcher became evident while he was a graduate student at Indiana University. There, he published a single-authored article in the Journal of Politics and wrote an award-winning dissertation. The JOP article broke new ground in the study of race and electoral behavior by showing that African American population density has positive effects on white voting for black candidates when small geographic units of aggregation, such as electoral precincts, are considered. Tom’s dissertation on gubernatorial elections won APSA’s William Anderson Award for best doctoral dissertation in the field of state and local politics, federalism, or intergovernmental relations and went on to become the book Campaign Dynamics: The Race for Governor (2000, University of Michigan Press). In the book, Tom makes major contributions to our understanding not only of gubernatorial elections, but of campaigns and elections more generally. He applies Riker’s theory of “heresthetic change” to electoral politics, showing that gubernatorial candidates realize that they are unlikely to change opinion distributions over the course of a campaign and instead try to shift the salient cleavage structure to one that most advantages them. Elections, Tom shows, are won not by changing voters’ minds on important issues, but by successfully making the issues on which the electorate agrees with a given candidate the most salient to voting behavior.
Tom further contributed a great deal to scholarship on American party politics. Here, some of his most visible work was his research on partisan “conflict extension” with longtime friend and coauthor, Geoff Layman. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that periods of partisan change are characterized by “conflict displacement,” with the parties becoming less polarized on older issue agendas as they grow more polarized on new ones, Carsey and Layman show that, in recent decades, the parties have become more polarized on multiple issue dimensions—partisan conflict has extended from older policy agendas to newer ones. This has happened in part because individual party identifiers and party activists have brought their own views on multiple policy agendas into line with the ascendant positions among party elites and other party activists. This theory of conflict extension stands in contrast not only to the traditional conflict displacement perspective, but also to contemporary theories of “ideological realignment” and issue-based party “sorting,” and has important implications for contemporary party politics. Carsey and Layman, along with other colleagues, published multiple articles on conflict extension, including an article in the American Political Science Review that won APSA’s Jack Walker Award for the best paper published (in a two-year period) on political organizations and parties. Tom believed that the conflict extension perspective helped to explain the support of Republican voters and activists for Donald Trump and his policy positions—on issues such as trade, foreign policy, social spending, and relationships with Russia—that run counter to traditional conservative orthodoxy. In fact, he and Layman (along with Mark Brockway) were working on a book project on Trump and conflict extension in the final months and weeks of Tom’s life.
Tom also made numerous contributions to scholarship in political methodology. Most notably, his 2014 book on simulation methods (coauthored with former graduate student Jeff Harden) provided a comprehensive look at how social scientists can utilize computer simulation of data to accomplish several objectives, such as understanding the statistical properties of estimation techniques, evaluating new methods, emphasizing intuition in the presentation of statistical results, and directly testing substantive theories. In just four years since publication, the book is already widely used by researchers in a multitude of disciplines.
Tom’s service to the discipline of political science reached near legendary status as he quickly became one of the most important figures in the state politics field. Tom hosted the State Politics and Policy section’s website for several years and he helped host the 2009 State Politics and Policy Conference in Chapel Hill and Durham, NC. He served on and chaired the section’s selection site committee for several years and chaired APSA’s William Anderson Award Committee for best doctoral dissertation in state and local politics, federalism, or intergovernmental relations.
As editor of State Politics and Policy Quarterly from 2010 to 2014, he transitioned the journal to SAGE Publications as publisher, which drastically increased its readership and distribution. Tom also made the journal more selective and improved the quality of the manuscripts that were published. He took his job as editor very seriously. He regularly gave authors, particularly young scholars, helpful advice and critical feedback for getting their articles published even when they were being rejected from SPPQ. He also believed in the “desk reject,” because he strongly believed that it would help the scholars submitting manuscripts. His philosophy was that if he read a submission and saw that there was no way it was going to be published in SPPQ, that he should reject it and give the scholar feedback about how it could be improved, what was wrong, or where would be a better venue, instead of wasting their time waiting for blind reviews. These decisions to provide quality feedback to authors from the editor either in the case when the manuscript was being rejected by reviewers or editorially, greatly increased the amount of time Tom had to dedicate to the journal, but he saw it as worth the extra effort to serve the researchers and the field.
In 2017, Tom was awarded the Career Achievement Award by the State Politics and Policy Section of the APSA. His nomination letter was signed by 95 political scientists, a sign of how loved he was by his peers and how important his scholarly and service contributions to the field were. Although, due to his illness, he was not able to join in person, he Skyped with the section at the 2017 APSA business meeting to receive the award. Several weeks after, the treasurer of the State Politics Section emailed him to make sure he had received his award. Tom replied “it looks just great—though I have to say I was hoping it would be a leg lamp,” referencing one of his favorite movies, A Christmas Story. Since Tom was a great lover of practical jokes, the treasurer sent him a leg lamp immediately, to which Tom replied, “I received your gift acknowledging my ‘major award’ today. Both Dawn and I laughed out loud! You certainly brightened our day.”
In addition, the section established the Carsey Endowment for State Politics Research and Education in his honor. The fund’s purpose is to promote and assist graduate student participation in the annual State Politics and Policy Conference, which would celebrate one of Tom’s great strengths—his mentoring devotion and abilities.
Tom supported many activities in the political methodology community. He served as the lead host of the annual summer meeting of the Society for Political Methodology twice (2005, 2012). He also served on several committees, including the Small Conference Selection Committee, the Annual Summer Meeting Advisory Committee, the Summer Meeting Program Committee, and the Summer Meeting Best Graduate Student Poster Committee. In addition, Tom had a long history of service to other methods-related organizations, including ICPSR, the Qualitative Data Repository at Syracuse, and the IEEE International Conference on Big Data.
One of Tom’s largest contributions to political science was his work on data access and research transparency. He was one of the discipline’s most enthusiastic proponents for increasing the ease of data replication and the transparency of methodological decisions, and he worked to create a data replication and transparency policy for SPPQ and served on the APSA’s Advisory Committee on developing guidelines for Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT).
Beyond his leadership in the state politics and political methodology fields, Tom served as president of the Southern Political Science Association (2015–16) and as an officer of the SPSA for many years before that. In that capacity, Tom helped develop and implement the idea of the “conference within a conference.” These mini-conferences provide the specialization and in-depth intellectual interaction of a small conference within the confines of a large regional conference, greatly benefitting younger scholars and graduate students, and have helped to significantly increase attendance at SPSA meetings. In 2017, Tom was awarded the Manning Dauer Award for outstanding service to the SPSA.
Tom contributed greatly to the Political Science Department while he was the Pearsall Chair of State and Local Politics at UNC, Chapel Hill. He was vitally important in the graduate program, serving as graduate admissions director for American politics and advising many of the graduate students. He was an institution builder: he noticed that students had difficulty completing their MAs in a timely fashion so he arranged for students to present their theses before the faculty in the spring of their second year. This greatly facilitated their completion. Nine years ago he and Virginia Gray, and later joined by Chris Clark, started a dissertation workshop for students in state politics, broadly defined. These biweekly meetings improved the quality and speed of the dissertation process; as well they were a lot of fun. Tom took interest in improving the methods offerings in the department; he taught methods as well as hired younger faculty members with new skills. Most of all, he was known for his mentoring of graduate students and young faculty in their time of need. Female students especially appreciated his mentoring, many of whom have recently spoken eloquently about how Tom helped them at critical points in their careers.
Tom served as the director of the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at UNC, Chapel Hill from 2011 to 2017. The institute helps many scholars whose home institutions cannot provide grant proposal development and administration with assistance in developing and administering their grants. It also offers over 70 workshops a year and a number of summer courses through ICPSR for graduate students from underrepresented groups through NSF’s AGEP program. However, the Data Archive was clearly Tom’s “baby.” The institute now maintains the third-largest archive of computer-readable social science data and it provides a dataverse for the storage, replication, and archiving of data.
Although his CV was long with official service roles, his informal service to the profession, particularly at professional conferences, was what made so many people take note of Tom. Tom did not attend conferences in the way many political scientists do. He saw attending and meaningfully contributing to conferences as a special part of the job. Tom would always arrive early and stay the length of every conference, attending every function and every panel he could squeeze in and he would continue to do this long after everyone else felt like they could ease up a bit. He listened attentively, offered keen insights and, always constructively, demanded more. He often forewent panel breaks to visit one-on-one with a younger—or, at times, older—scholar to discuss alternative approaches that might better achieve the objective. Tom also made every effort to keep discussion at panel presentations productive and on track. As he listened to presentations he had a rule of writing down at least one comment or question on every paper so that he can intervene and redirect the discussion if the post-presentation discourse became hostile or just unproductive, and to make sure every paper got some attention.
Perhaps most importantly, Tom was a great mentor and friend. Tom was generous with his contributions of time and feedback to junior and senior colleagues. He was a fantastic critic, whose comments, which he offered on hundreds of papers sent to him by friends and people who he had met at conferences, were always appreciated by people following his advice. In addition to colleagues, Tom demonstrated a strong commitment to working with graduate students. He did so with graduate students at UIC, FSU, and especially UNC, Chapel Hill, where he worked with other faculty members to produce an exceptional group of PhD graduates over the 11 years he was affiliated with the department. Tom directed 21 dissertations, 13 MA theses, seven undergraduate honor’s theses, and served on an additional 49 dissertation committees and 12 MA committees.
Tom also helped mentor graduate students and young faculty who were not students at his home institution. He regularly had Skype, phone, and in-person conversations with mentees at other institutions who would seek his advice on everything from career decisions to teaching techniques, to manuscript idea development, to specific modeling decisions and data use. As Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz noted, “The first time I really got to know Tom was during my first year as an assistant professor. I attended my first State Politics and Policy Conference. On the last night Tom sat and talked with me until almost 3 a.m. about my research and how best to frame my work to make sure it was published in quality journals as well as where to go with my research next. Ever since I’ve made a point of seeking out Tom every chance I get to run ideas by him and check in on life. Even his approach to parenting his kids taught me how to be a better parent.” Even into the last days of his illness, he regularly Skyped with these mentees, selflessly asking them about their research and offering insights, noting it made him feel better to be engaged and keep living like he always had despite the challenges of ALS.
Geoff Layman noted how Tom’s incredible friendship went well beyond his mentorship of younger faculty and was felt by his peers as well. Tom’s mentoring of Geoff began when they were fellow graduate students at Indiana. Geoff says that without Tom’s warm friendship, patience in listening to his problems and self-doubts, and invitations to countless meals at the Carsey home, he never would have made it through graduate school. Tom’s love for his friends is also exemplified by a story Geoff shared that he thinks embodies Tom’s indelible warmth and friendship. During one MPSA conference, Layman developed an allergic reaction to a particularly mediocre meal at the particularly mediocre steakhouse that used to reside in the basement of the Palmer House. When he decided late in the evening that a trip to the Northwestern University hospital was necessary, Tom insisted on accompanying him even though he had a flight out of Chicago at 5:30 a.m. the next morning. Tom endured a sleepless night in the emergency waiting room, showing such compassion and support for his friend that the hospital staff assumed he and Geoff were much more than just research partners. That, Geoff says, is the true definition of a good friend.
Although Tom was an impressive scholar, it would be a mistake to measure his legacy simply by the number of books, publications, or grant dollars he produced. Tom’s true impact came from how he influenced the lives of his family, students, colleagues, and nearly everyone he encountered in his lifetime. His kindness, compassion, sense of humor, quick wit, and selfless behavior serve as reminders that being an exceptional academic and all around good person are not mutually exclusive. As a generation of Carsey students and friends have each navigated academia and life, the mantra guiding many has been “What Would Carsey Do?”
Tom will be missed dearly, and even though he has passed entirely too soon, his care and compassion in life and academia will be carried forward by all of those he influenced during his lifetime.
—Kevin Banda, Texas Tech University
—Jennifer Benz, NORC at the University of Chicago
—Bruce Desmarais, Pennsylvania State University
—Virginia Gray, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
—Jeff Harden, University of Notre Dame
—Geoff Layman, University of Notre Dame
—Justin Kirkland, University of Virginia
—Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz, University of Rhode Island
—Jason Windett, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Hugh Heclo
Hugh Heclo was one of the leading political scientists of the twentieth century in subfields covering American politics, social policy, comparative government, the presidency, executive branch politics, and public administration. During his career he taught at Essex (UK), George Washington, MIT, Yale, and Harvard Universities, before moving to George Mason University in 1987 as the Clarence J. Robinson Professor of Public Affairs, a chair that was designed to attract world class scholars who could convey their research to a broad public audience and were committed to teaching undergraduates.
Hugh was born in Marion, Ohio on March 10, 1943 and died on August 6, 2017; he was 74 years old. Heclo and his mother moved to Arlington, VA in the late 1950s, where he graduated from high school. Caught up in the excitement and idealism of the 1960 election and the young Kennedy presidency, he enrolled in George Washington University and graduated in 1965. Living in the heart of Washington, DC, he became fascinated with the exercise of governmental power and how it could be harnessed for the public good.
He moved to the UK in 1967 and earned his MA at Manchester University in England. Returning to the US, he earned his PhD in Political Science at Yale University (1970) and wrote his dissertation on the creation of the welfare state in Sweden and the United Kingdom. Yale University Press later published it as Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden: From Relief to Income Maintenance (1974). This path-breaking book influenced a generation of scholarship on social policy and was reissued in 2010 by the European Consortium for Political Research as part of their classic book series in political science.
After receiving his PhD, he took his first teaching job in 1971 at Essex University. When he was in England, he met Aaron Wildavsky who asked him to work with him on his research project by interviewing permanent undersecretaries and civil servants in the British government. In his interviews, Heclo grew to appreciate the importance of trust and personal relationships in making and implementing public policy. Their collaboration resulted in publication of The Private Government of Public Money: Community and Policy Inside British Politics (1974).
After his research on political appointee-career relationships in Whitehall, he decided to take up a similar project in the US and “study how in real life, political agendas get translated into public policies in the executive branch.” From his position as a research fellow at the Brookings Institution beginning in 1973, he conducted more than 200 interviews with political appointees and career civil servants to explore the informal work ways that made the executive branch function. His research was published as A Government of Strangers (1977), a classic of executive branch policy making in the United States. The book analyzed how the short-term perspective of the presidentially-appointed “strangers” interacted with the longer-term oriented career civil servants in implementing public policy. His book won the APSA Woodrow Wilson Award and the National Academy of Public Administration’s Brownlow Award. His coauthored book, Comparative Public Policy: The Politics of Social Choice in Europe and America (1975), won the APSA Gladys Kammerer Award.
In his Strangers book and other writings, Heclo stressed the obligations of the complementary roles of political appointees and the career services. In “OMB and Neutral Competence,” he analyzed the role of politics in the Office of Management and Budget in the executive office of the president. He warned of the danger of OMB becoming too close to the political fortunes of a particular president rather than to the long term mission of OMB. In stressing the importance of “neutral competence” to the function of a democratically-elected government, he argued that the appropriate role of the career civil servant was “loyalty that argues back.” That is, “giving one’s cooperation and best independent judgment of the issues to partisan bosses—and being sufficiently uncommitted to be able to do so for a succession of partisan leaders.” In contrast, the appropriate role of political appointees is to “politicize the White House analysis of issues, not to politicize OMB.”
He was one of the first scholars to discern that the traditional metaphor of “iron triangles”—in which few individuals on congressional staffs, representatives of interest groups, and bureaucrats dominate policymaking—was no longer accurate. The emerging policy environment, rather than being dominated by a few powerful individuals, was actually heavily influenced by “issue networks.” His new approach focused on the amorphous, but nevertheless highly influential, groups of expert policy elites in governmental agencies, think tanks, and universities that shaped public policies.
His scholarship was imbued with the normative ideals that should shape behavior of politicians and bureaucrats in a democratic polity. He lamented the increasing number of political appointees, decline in civility, and polarization that have marked the last several decades of Washington politics.
Heclo wrote prolifically about the presidency and how it changed over the latter part of the twentieth century. In a series of books, he decried the advent of the “permanent campaign”—the tendency to bring the simplicities and conflicts of the campaign into the process of governing. “If we end up interpreting our whole constitutional system as an extension of election-time horse-race thinking, supplemented by mass plebiscites, then something will have gone wrong,” He emphasized the importance of presidents listening to competing advice about policymaking.
He argued that because of the polarized era the US has been going through, it is all the more important for presidents to listen to dissenting voices. In several books on Ronald Reagan he praised Reagan’s character and political leadership, while criticizing him for constitutional lapses in the Iran Contra affair.
Throughout his scholarship, Heclo was concerned with the normative values of good governance. In his book, On Thinking Institutionally (2011), he emphasized the importance of connecting the present with the past and the future and paying attention to the human relationships that create and maintain institutions. In his 2002 Gaus Lecture, “The Spirit of Public Administration,” he argued that the ethos of public administration necessarily entails the careful stewardship of the institutions of democratic governance.
Later in his career, he wrote several books and articles addressing the appropriate place of religion in the public sphere of the United States, in which he argued that it was legitimate for religious values to inform public policy, but that the government should not favor one religion over another. Hugh was temperamentally a humble person; he did not seek honors, though honors came to him. He was an elected member of the National Academy of Public Administration and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship and won the APSA John Gaus Award for lifetime achievement in public administration and political science. He chaired the Ford Foundation research advisory committee and served on the Scholars’ Council advising the Librarian of Congress.
At Harvard, George Mason and other universities, he was known as a champion of his students, many of whom kept in touch with him long after their courses were over. He retired from George Mason in 2014 and spent most of his time writing and tending to his tree farm in White Post, Virginia. He grew conifers for Christmas trees, and people came from miles around to search for their perfect tree, which he would cut down for them. In the summers, he trimmed and tended to the trees and worked to return native American plants and trees to his land.
He is survived by his wife, Beverley Carole Heclo, to whom he was married for 46 years, and their daughter, Ashley Rebecca Heclo.
In remarks about James Q. Wilson, with whom he cotaught a course at MIT, Heclo said, that Wilson exhibited “a combination of gentle modesty and a ferocious intellectual honesty”—an encomium that could aptly be applied to Heclo himself.
—James P. Pfiffner, George Mason University
—Steven Rathgeb Smith, APSA Executive Director
Lee Ann Fujii
Lee Ann Fujii, associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, died March 2, 2018 of complications arising from the flu. She was 56. Lee Ann was a loving sister, daughter, and friend. A scholar of race, ethnicity and politics, Lee Ann pushed boundaries both in her scholarship and in her life. She was a yogi, a world traveller, a shopper, and a fan of the arts. She was funny, loyal, and a constructive critic who never avoided difficult conversations or shied away from the truth.
Lee Ann was born and raised in Seattle. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in music from Reed College and then spent several years as an actress and in the tech industry in San Francisco. Her experiences moving through the world with racial ambiguity ignited her interest in questions of identity and violence, and she ultimately decided to pursue a career in the academy. Lee Ann earned an MA in international relations from San Francisco State University in 2001, where she wrote a thesis on identity formation and the Rwandan genocide and then moved to Washington, DC to pursue a doctorate in political science at the George Washington University. She earned her PhD in 2006. Lee Ann then served as assistant professor of political science at GWU from 2007 to 2010 before moving to the University of Toronto in 2011, where she received tenure and was promoted to the rank of associate professor in 2015.
AN EXPERT ON POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND IDENTITY
Lee Ann was a recognized expert on political violence. Growing out of her doctoral research, her first major study addressed a political violence puzzle: “How do ordinary people come to commit mass violence against their own neighbors, friends, and family?” Lee Ann spent most of 2003 and 2004 as a Fulbright Scholar in Rwanda. Knocking on doors and visiting prisons with her interpreter—research assistant, she interviewed current and former residents of two rural communities about their life experiences and memories of the period between 1990 and 1994. Consistent with her rejection of hierarchy and the cult of prestige, Lee Ann purposively selected participants whose actions during the 1994 genocide ranged from rescuers to killers, and ultimately focused her analysis on “Joiners,” whom she identified as “the lowest-level participants in the genocide.” Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Cornell University Press, 2009) demonstrates that social ties and group dynamics had more effect on individuals’ actions during the genocide than ethnic hatreds or fears. This close attention to individuals, interactions, and social context comprises a thread woven throughout all her work.
As her research progressed, Lee Ann made several poignant observations about the construction of identity. In a 2010 talk at UC Irvine, she contended, “Identity amounts to the repeated and public actions, activities, and practices—some calculated, some spontaneous, some scripted, some improvised—that make them real.” She challenged simplistic understandings about identity, arguing instead that it is dynamic and constructed and defies facile interpretations.
Showtime: The Logic and Power of Violent Display is Lee Ann’s newest work. Although not yet finished, it develops the idea of “violent display” using evidence from Rwanda, Bosnia, and the United States. At its core is an understanding of resistance. Showtime challenges the idea that violence is inevitable. Interruption is possible, and it often occurs through small, everyday acts. Lee Ann notes pointedly that bystanders are complicit. Drawing on her theatre background and extending ideas developed in her first book, Lee Ann frames the development of violent display using concepts like performance, rehearsal, intermission, sideshow, and encore. Her passion for this work is palpable in the video of her last presentation of this work just a few short weeks before her death.
The energy with which Lee Ann approached her work is all the more notable given the difficult topics that she studied. She spent years interviewing people, sifting through archives, and visiting field sites where horrible atrocities—lynchings, genocides, and torture—took place. She did this with kindness, with grace and, when appropriate, with humour. Lee Ann firmly believed that emotion does not taint “objective scholarship.” To create good research, she knew scholars need to study difficult things and confront hard truths. Lee Ann questioned almost everything, and her research is a painstaking compilation of the answers at which she eventually arrived. Often, these answers were unsettling, but she would not let us escape recognizing the horror and violence inherent in the human experience. She held humanity accountable.
Much of Lee Ann’s research was conducted with the support of several prestigious awards. These included fellowships with the Fulbright Program (2003–04), Ford Foundation (2013–14), and the Institute for Advanced Study (2016–17), as well as being named a Visiting Scholar with the Russell Sage Foundation (2013–14). She held research grants from the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, the United States Institute of Peace, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council.
METHODOLOGICAL INTERVENTIONS
Lee Ann’s methodological choices were groundbreaking. A deeply creative person who applied this quality to her fieldwork, she honed what friends sometimes jokingly called the “Fujii method”: to understand someone’s experiences, you need to talk to them over time, usually in several lengthy interviews. Lee Ann quickly became one of the most respected interpretivists in political science as she explored a host of methodological questions in several journal articles. Her article on accidental ethnography, “Five Stories Of Accidental Ethnography,” describes how researchers can use unplanned moments to understand the worlds they are studying and their position within them, for example, while “Shades of Truth and Lies” explores what scholars can learn from deceptive statements. Reflecting on that article, Dvora Yanow writes, “Her abductive puzzle (my words, not hers) was the tension between her ’training’ (her word) in political science to consider a lie—something she was told in an interview which other sources later contradicted—to be inadmissible in the realm of scientific truth, and her newfound insights that what people told her could well be meaningful in its own right: signalling something of importance to them (and of significance to her research), rather than an intentional distortion of the truth, although the latter, too, could be usable knowledge.”
In Interviewing in Social Science (Routledge 2018), Lee Ann develops what she calls a “relational approach” to research. For Lee Ann, the value of interviewing is not the answers that research participants provide to the questions that we pose, but rather in the data that emerge through our interactions. She urges scholars to conduct their work with reflexivity, to consider how we engage with others and how our own positions—and that of our research subjects—influence the knowledge that is developed.
Lee Ann was always conscious of relationships and of power in her scholarship and her life. Her work pushed other scholars, including nonqualitative researchers, to consider the ethics of their work and their responsibilities to their research participants. Lee Ann argued that ethics in research is not simply a “box to check” on your IRB application. She reminds us that power relationships are asymmetrical, even if you have obtained a person’s consent, and that protecting research participants involves more than simply informing them of their risks and having them sign a form. Lee Ann writes, “When conducting research with human beings, we must remind ourselves that to enter another’s world as a researcher is a privilege, not a right. Wrestling with ethical dilemmas is the price we pay for the privileges we enjoy.” Lee Ann demanded that researchers be accountable in their relationships with research participants.
PUSHING INSTITUTIONAL AND DISCIPLINARY BOUNDARIES
Lee Ann also challenged disciplinary norms and practices in her department and in public. Her gently phrased 2012 article, “Research Ethics 101,” calls for a broader consideration of research ethics. It was followed in 2016 by a thorough critique of the dishonest nature of DA-RT (Data Access and Research Transparency) discussions. “Who can say that transparency is a more pressing problem than the entrenched forms of structural and agentic power that shape who and what gets published, who gets hired and promoted, and which methods and methodologies become anointed as the new ’gold’ standard?” she asks in “The dark side of DA-RT.”
Lee Ann was deeply—and rightly—critical of the lack of diversity in political science, both demographically and methodologically, and she enumerated concrete actions that could be taken to address these shortcomings. Her willingness to challenge disciplinary practices was obvious in her 2016 International Studies Association Northeast keynote, “Changing Disciplines,” later published in revised form on Duck of Minerva. “The discipline tolerates white mediocrity very well,” she observed, “but does not similarly hire and celebrate non-white mediocrity.” Lee Ann was particularly proud of this intervention, which portrayed the exclusion and inequity many still do not wish to confront.
As Lahoma Thomas, one of Lee Ann’s doctoral students, observes, “When you do not see your experiences and those of your community represented in the literature, when the manner in which you make sense of the social world is in opposition to the foundational texts in your discipline, and when you disagree with some of the theoretical premises that guide your discipline because your positionality in the world has shown you something else, it can be a very alienating experience that conjures feelings of frustration, alienation, and self-doubt. Lee Ann experientially understood that. She spoke to those feelings in an authentic way. Equally as important, Lee Ann understood that seeing the world differently was a strength, not a deficit.”
A MENTOR AND TEACHER
Lee Ann taught classes in comparative politics, qualitative methods, and political violence. She was a gifted teacher who often said that working with students was her favorite part of her job. Lee Ann did not profess woodenly from a podium; she asked questions, she challenged, and she inspired. In her graduate seminars, she pushed doctoral students to move beyond critique. She wanted them to engage with the arguments they were reading. Lee Ann cared deeply about writing—her own was lucid, approachable, and evocative—and she helped students to develop clear communication as a weapon in their arsenals. One of her mentors, Dvora Yanow, has described it as “a writing whose voice was as approachable as she was, speaking passionately with the authority of experience coupled with the humility that acknowledges the possibility of other interpretations.”
Lee Ann was laser focused on the persistence of race and gender bias in the academy, and she worked strategically to disrupt this by offering support to marginalized scholars. Lee Ann showed up for graduate students and junior faculty of color, for those without degrees or jobs at top ten graduate programs, for those engaged in particularly difficult field research, for those whose “pathway to academia was roundabout, nontraditional, and unexpected” like her own, and for a host of others. Lee Ann did so much of the typically invisible, underappreciated labor that fuels institutions and helps others to flourish. She provided career counseling and connections, read multiple drafts of their/our work, and cheered on the discouraged even as she dealt with her own losses and disappointments. “While Lee Ann was an academic she was an activist at heart,” Lahoma Thomas points out. “The academy was just the forum in which her activism took place. Her revolution was located in the academy. She was committed to transforming the discipline of political science from within.” Aarie Glas, who worked with Lee Ann for a number of years as a research assistant and teaching assistant says, “Lee Ann taught me and many others to be both critical and reflexive as scholars and as human beings. Most uniquely, however, she taught through her example what it is to be a mentor in the truest sense—to be emphatic, generous, and engaged in ways that I can only aspire to myself.”
GONE TOO SOON
Lee Ann was at once critical, compassionate, and kind. A cheerleader who never missed an opportunity to celebrate her friends and students, she would say “you are fucking brilliant!” with so much conviction you actually believed it. Nearly all of Lee Ann’s emails were signed, “LAF,” both her initials and a nod to her uproarious personality. She had a full-bodied laugh that took over the room, and when she really got going, she would add enthusiastic table-thumping. Lee Ann didn’t just listen to you talk, she engaged, excitedly exclaiming “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” to let you know she was with you. There was almost nothing traditional about the way that Lee Ann went about her life or her work.
Those of us who knew Lee Ann well know just how much she loved her cats, who were like her children. Because of her dedication to animals, her family has suggested that if anyone wants to honor her memory with a donation, please consider doing so at your local animal shelter.
Lee Ann is survived by her two brothers, Carey and Jeff, and her sister-in-law Josephine. She is also fondly remembered by a large circle of friends, who span continents, generations, and backgrounds. These friendships were built on tea, talks, and plates of food. With Lee Ann’s death, our tables are all a bit too quiet.
—Stephanie McNulty, Franklin and Marshall College
—Erin Tolley, University of Toronto
—Robin Turner, Butler University
Ted G. Jelen
“I really love doing this.”
—Ted G. Jelen
Thaddeus (Ted) Gerard Jelen, professor of political science at the University of Las Vegas, Nevada, passed away on November 21, 2017 due to a long illness linked to a professorship abroad. He was 65. Ted received his PhD in political science from Ohio State in 1979, taught for a year at the University of Kentucky, and then went to Illinois Benedictine College, later renamed as Benedictine University, where he served for many years as department chair. Limited computer resources at Benedictine forced Ted to buy the General Social Survey every year, and then pay a data company to subset the variables to a file size that the school’s computers could handle. From 1990 to 1991 he was a visiting professor at Georgetown University, and the availability of more powerful computers and ICPSR datasets led to an explosion of research. He was hired as chair at UNLV and served in that role from 1997 to 2003, and then remained a faculty member there until his death. Ted was a ubiquitous presence at conferences in the US and abroad for many years, always found in the hotel lobby with a big smile, a funny story, and genuine interest in your latest project, which he always proclaimed to be “really interesting.”
Ted was a prodigious scholar, with 15 authored or edited books, 81 peer reviewed articles, and 64 book chapters. His published work has been cited thousands of times in political science, sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, gender studies, and religious studies journals in the US and internationally. His graduate work centered on political theory, and his work frequently connected careful empirical analysis to broader theoretical themes. Ted had a research agenda that reflected his upbringing as a Polish kid in Chicago: the Catholic Church, religion and the state, sex, abortion, gender, and guns. He published several articles comparing attitudes on gender and abortion between the US and Poland. To that end, he was proud to be named to the Roll of Honor of Polish Science by the Polish Ministry of Science in 2001. His knowledge of Chicago politics also left him with a seemingly inexhaustible stream of colorful stories.
Ted wrote on a wide variety of subjects but his major contributions were in the field of religion and politics, gender politics, and the politics of abortion, in each case focusing mainly on the US, but also with a number of papers in comparative politics. He focused on two broad themes in religion and politics—the political mobilization of religion and church/state relations. In the former, he published two books on congregations and clergy in Greencastle Indiana, a variety of papers on how religious context affects the way that religion influences individuals, and several important papers on measurement issues. His edited book Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective was translated into Spanish and chapters that Ted wrote were translated into Bosnian and Hebrew and frequently cited. His most important work on church-state relations was a fine book To Serve God and Mammon, Second Edition by Georgetown University Press. He also wrote on public attitudes on church state issues. He published papers laying out research agendas in the field in 1988 and again in 1998. Just as important to the subfield, Ted laid out a publishing roadmap, showing that it was possible to pursue a career exploring religion and politics. He published in a wide range of outlets across the social sciences, but also demonstrated that it was possible to appear in the top political science journals including Journal of Politics and American Journal of Political Science.
His work on gender attitudes involved carefully dissecting different attitudinal objects, and showed how religion was one of many sources of these attitudes. His book Between Two Absolutes: Public Opinion and the Politics of Abortion has been a major resource on this topic, with chapters frequently reprinted in undergraduate methods readers. He published papers laying out a research agenda on abortion politics, and several papers comparing US attitudes with those in Poland, Germany, and a number of other countries.
Ted was a workhorse in political science and the sociology of religion, serving on more than 50 associational offices and committees. He presented papers in eight countries in the final decade of his career alone, and served on more than 35 panels as discussant or chair in the last five years. When associations needed volunteers, Ted always raised his hand. And when conferences were held in Las Vegas or colleagues visited to give lectures, he was always ready to show them a night of “applied probability theory.”
As journal editor, he solicited papers from promising graduate students, junior faculty, and international scholars. He served as book review editor for the Review of Religious Research, and edited the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion from 1999 to 2003. He was the inaugural coeditor of Politics and Religion from 2007 to 2011. The APSA Religion and Politics Organized Section created an award for the best article appearing in Politics & Religion in his name in 2016. He served as coeditor of two book series, first with Georgetown and then later with Palgrave, where he championed the first books of many scholars. He was also coeditor of the forthcoming Oxford Encyclopedia of Religion and Politics.
Ted was most active in service responsibilities that allowed him to assist younger scholars, chairing or serving, for example, on the Aaron Wildavsky Best Dissertation Award Committee for the Religion and Politics Section many times from 1995 to 2010. Across several research areas and disciplines, he was a perpetual source of support for scholars, mentoring, coauthoring, reading their work, and a perennial discussant whose panel benediction was always “I have no doubt these papers will appear in a fine journal soon.” Ted was always enthusiastic about even the most preliminary work by graduate students and junior faculty, always saying that “this is a really exciting idea, here is what I would do with it.”
Ted will be remembered for many things, but most of all through the indelible impact he had on generations of younger scholars:
He was my first big advocate. I owe him so much. I’ll miss always seeing him before anyone else at conferences.
—Laura R. Olson
The very first article I published as a graduate student back in 2001 was a result of Ted approaching us after a conference panel and inviting a submission to JSSR. It meant a lot, especially at that point in a career. I don’t think I ever attended a Religion and Politics section business meeting where he didn’t volunteer to serve on some best paper/dissertation/book committee of some kind.
—J. Quin Monson
When I was a religion and politics grad student, I became familiar with Ted’s brilliant mind through his published works before we ever met in person. As I reflect on this loss for the discipline, what I most remember about Ted was his warm smile and great sense of humor. He had a joke for every occasion, it seemed. I also appreciated his generosity, his willingness to give his time to younger scholars.
—Napp Nazworth
In every single encounter I had with Ted he was, quite simply, generous. Generous with his time, energy, and thoughtfulness. It was always such a pleasure seeing him at conferences, and he made even the greenest of graduate students feel special—he listened to your thoughts and was curious about your work. Most importantly, I left every interaction with Ted with a smile, and a better day.
—Charles Dahan
I had this exact same experience when he was editor at P&R in 2010—it became my first publication. He went on to write a very generous tenure letter as an external reviewer. I know because at the next APSA annual meeting he approached me and said: “They better have a glass of white wine waiting for you because I told them there should be no discussion on your tenure case.”
—Amanda Friesen
He was on my junior scholars panel at MPSA when I was in grad school. He provided us all with such generous and encouraging comments and words. Sorry to hear this, a huge loss to the field.
—Jeanine DiCesaris Kraybill
—Clyde Wilcox, Georgetown University
—Paul A. Djupe, Denison University
Dennis William Moran
Dennis Wm Moran, professional faculty specialist, died February 21, 2018, in St. Joseph’s Hospital, Mishawaka, Indiana, with his wife Doreen Deane-Moran and son Padraic at his side. He had retired the previous summer after working for The Review of Politics at the University of Notre Dame for 47 years.
Dennis began working for The Review while he was still a graduate student at the University of Notre Dame, concentrating on linguistics, Old and Middle English language and literature. His research specialty was the Pearl Poet. After he received his doctorate, he taught at Holy Cross College and Indiana University, South Bend, as well as at the University of Notre Dame. However, what began as a part-time internship at The Review in 1972 gradually expanded into a full-time job as executive associate editor.
At The Review, Dennis worked for six different editors in chief: M.A. Fitzsimons, Thomas Stritch, Frederick J. Crosson, Donald P. Kommers, Walter Nicgorski, and Catherine H. Zuckert. Since these editors came from a variety of disciplines—history, journalism, philosophy, liberal studies, and political science—Dennis became the voice of continuity who recalled the distinguished history of the journal for those who did not remember or perhaps even know it. He served in a wide range of capacities—as an initial reader and evaluator of manuscript submissions, copyeditor, book review editor, production, marketing, and sales manager, student employer, negotiating agreements with publishers and digital libraries such as JSTOR about permissions and copyrights. He had a variety of titles, but as one of the former editors in chief said, Dennis was the “heart and soul” of the journal.
The Review has a distinguished history. It was founded in 1939 by an émigré from Nazi Germany, Waldemar Gurian, as a journal devoted to philosophical and historical studies of politics. The authors it has published include such luminaries as Hannah Arendt, Carl Friedrich, George Kennan, Alasdair MacIntyre, Hans Morgenthau, John Nef, Yves Simon, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin. But, as Dennis observed, with time many changes have come to both the content and production of the journal. He was there to oversee and facilitate them all.
Some years ago in a report he was asked to submit to the dean of the college, Dennis recalled that when he started doing editorial work for Professor Fitzsimons, manuscripts were often still being submitted in handwritten form. There were no computers in the office. Everything was typewritten and then sent to the printers to be typeset. The refereeing of manuscripts also was a very time-consuming proposition. Before the internet and email, the search for referees and their addresses and other information required constant snailmail, repeated trips to the library, phone conversations, and the like. All subscriptions, both institutional and individual, all across the world were managed by the office staff. They had to collect the money as well as see that copies of the journal were delivered to all subscribers. One of his funniest experiences was struggling with First Bank to have a money order from the USSR converted into US dollars.
Before The Review contracted with Cambridge University Press in 2006 to publish and distribute the journal, Dennis supervised a series of graduate interns, who helped find reviewers and evaluate manuscript submissions as well as undergraduates who did a great deal of the work preparing the final copy to be published and distributed by a local press. The current copyeditor spoke for many, if not all of these students when he wrote: “Dennis is the best boss I have ever worked for, and as good a guide to the publishing world that a novice to the industry could hope to find. I could not begin to account for all that I’ve learned from Dennis; suffice it to say that it goes well beyond the minutiae of the editing process. The wealth of knowledge at Dennis’s command is simply staggering, and I have never known him to be anything but forthcoming and generous in his willingness to share any of it upon request.”
Having earned a PhD in english at the University of Notre Dame, Dennis knew a great deal about literature. He specialized in medieval studies, which includes history and philosophy as well. As a double major in classics and philosophy, he had learned ancient Greek and Latin as an undergraduate at Youngstown University. After working at The Review for 47 years as well as for the Democratic party in Indiana, he had also come to know a great deal about politics—theoretical and historical as well as practical.
An active member of the Caucus for a New Political Science APSA section, Dennis served several times as chair and program director. He also chaired the Michael Harrington Book Award Committee several times and was production manager and consultant for the New Political Science Journal as well as editor of the newsletter.
The breadth of Dennis’s interests and competencies may be indicated by the fact that he wrote poetry as well as academic book reviews on topics as varied as George Orwell, aging liberalism, and Levi Strauss. He was invited to present papers at the International Lawrence Durrell Conference in Canada as well as the American Maritain Society and World Congress of Marsilius of Padua Studies. He contributed an essay to a volume, Voegelin Recollected, and coedited The Future of Thomism, for the University of Notre Dame Press.
Despite his great learning, Dennis was no pedant. He loved baseball, especially the Chicago White Sox. He regularly and consistently extended himself and his assistance on a personal as well as a professional level to everyone he met. He thus acted as one might expect a broadly learned good Christian humanist would. His own struggles with health and the problems of his loved ones made him sensitive to what others might be enduring. He always expressed compassion and tried to be helpful. He showed himself to be a courteous gentleman. For example, he never forgot to send flowers to the women working in the office on Valentine’s Day. However, demonstrating that he was not simply a romantic, but had his ironic side as well, he just as regularly celebrated Machiavelli’s birthday.
He will be missed.
—Catherine Zuckert, University of Notre Dame
Keep PS Informed
Help us honor the lives and work of political scientists. To submit an In Memoriam tribute, contact PS editorial associate Nick Townsend at ntownsend@apsanet.org.
