Charles Edward Lindblom, APSA President (1980–1981)
One of the great social scientists of the twentieth century, Charles Edward Lindblom, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Economics and Political Science at Yale University, died on January 30, 2018, at his home in Santa Fe, NM. He was born on March 21, 1917 and was thus approaching 101 years. According to his family he passed away quickly and peacefully, as if “he had decided it was time for him to go; so he did.”
A PRESTIGIOUS CAREER
Charles E. Lindblom was born and raised in Turlock, CA, a small town founded and in its early days dominated by a group of Swedish, fundamentalist immigrants. Lindblom’s grandfather (on his father’s side), John Gustaf Lindblom had left a poor farmer’s life in western Sweden in the early 1880s and settled as a homestead farmer in Minnesota. In 1911 his son, Charles August Lindblom, now married to Emma Norman Lindblom, followed a large group of other Swedes to seek a better life in California. Soon after their arrival the family bought a small grocery store, an enterprise which eventually engaged the whole family—parents and their four children—including Charles Edward. The store provided the Lindblom family with a modest living for many years, but during the Depression in the early 1930s it went bankrupt, a catastrophic event particularly for the father, Charles August, who never really recovered from it and died in 1941, at the age of 57.
Charles Edward was a successful high school student in Turlock, and his mother Emma wanted her son to go on to college. She had even saved from the modest family income for that purpose. In 1933, Charles Edward was able to enroll at Stanford University. He was a successful student there as well, majoring in economics, and upon graduation in 1936, he went on to graduate school at the University of Chicago. To support himself he soon after began teaching economics at the University of Minnesota. The Minnesota faculty included a number of well-known economists but a special problem followed from the fact that they were part of the University’s Business School. To some mainstream faculty, young Lindblom soon stood out as an unorthodox and even dangerously radical teacher. Particularly challenging to many was his preoccupation with Oskar Lange’s ideas on market socialism. Eventually he was fired, as Lindblom put it, from the University of Minnesota. In 1945, he finally finished his dissertation in labor economics at the University of Chicago, and began his long career as a teacher and researcher at Yale University.
At Yale, Lindblom initially worked in the Department of Economics. Although he found Yale to be a more diverse place than the University of Minnesota, he was also viewed by many there as too unorthodox in both research questions and methods to fit in. He was soon told that the chances were slim that he would be able to pursue a successful career leading to a tenured position in economics. Fortunately he had early on teamed up with Robert Dahl in the Political Science Department. Together they developed and taught the graduate course that would end up as their landmark book Politics, Economics, and Welfare (first published in 1953). Lindblom was then offered a joint, tenured position in economics and political science in the Political Science Department, a position that was eventually upgraded to the most prestigious professorial chair at Yale, a Sterling Professorship. His successful career at Yale formally ended in 1987, when he retired at the age of 70. He had acted as chair of the Political Science Department (1972–74), and he had been director of Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) from 1974 to 1980. Lindblom had very much inspired the creation of ISPS, the purpose of which was to stimulate interdisciplinary work in the social sciences at Yale and research issues of public relevance. Lindblom had also engaged in a wider professional setting, as president of the Association for Comparative Economic studies and also of APSA in the early 1980s.
LINDBLOM’S THINKING
Lindblom’s academic career runs parallel to that of Robert Dahl (1915–2014) and Robert Lane (1917–2017). The three of them arrived at Yale University in the late forties and together made its political science department the center of the discipline for a long time. Together Dahl and Lindblom established their name with Politics, Economics, and Welfare: Planning and Politico-Economic Systems Resolved into Basic Social Processes (1953), a masterly and highly influential book (in countries like the Netherlands as well) on societal organization or ordering. In it they exhaustively weigh the pros and cons of four different techniques of social control and coordination: market, hierarchy (in particular bureaucracy), polyarchy, and bargaining. The care they put into the examination of which technique or combination of techniques would optimize particular outcomes in different domains of society is second to none. The market technique is an impressive, extraordinarily powerful instrument with which to coordinate and control activities. Nevertheless, like the other techniques, it has important shortcomings and cannot be applied unconstrained in every sphere of life. The book strongly defends a social-democratic position since for Dahl and Lindblom it is in the end politics that decides which (combinations of) social instruments are to be used in which domains to accomplish politically-decided social goals.
The attention of Dahl has always been primarily focused on the political theory of pluralism; Lindblom has mainly dealt with the policy processes within the societies described by this theory, and, as usual within pluralist thought, he assumes that citizens do not agree on a definition of the common good and that society consists of a large number of competing and cooperating groups and institutions trying to reach their own objectives. Like pragmatists James and Dewey, Lindblom further believes that values and goals cannot and should not be defined abstractly, but only in a specific context. Also, despite differences of opinion about the goals of policies, agreement can often be reached on their instruments. Closely linked with pragmatism is his belief that policy makers have too little knowledge and information about society to make responsible comprehensive and far-reaching decisions. Therefore, it is better to try to solve manageable, short-term problems through cautious processes of trial and error. In this spirit, Lindblom makes a powerful plea for incrementalism: piece by piece, in an endless, continuous stream of marginal policy adjustments and enhancements, policy makers should seek to improve the existing situation, in the awareness that our knowledge and skills are extremely limited and that consequently large leaps forward are almost always doomed to failure. Lindblom defended this position among others in “The Science of ‘Muddling Through’” (1959) that is one of the most cited and reprinted social science articles of all time. Critics of Lindblom have often confused incrementalism with conservatism. A plea for incremental steps, however, says nothing about the speed at which these steps should follow up, about their direction.
Another characteristic of Lindblom’s thinking is that he extends the analogy between the economic market of goods and the electoral market to the formation of policy. Stakeholders negotiate with each other on a market about the instruments and goals of policies and in a manner similar to the economic market. Individual actions are unintentionally coordinated. This process will also by and large ensure that the different values held within a community are proportionally represented by the resulting policies. The structure of the policy market, however, is again not given for Lindblom: politics can and should regulate this market. It needs to be regulated which parties are active, and how strong their relative positions are. If, in existing negotiations between stakeholders, particular interests, values, or goals are not adequately taken into account, it is the job of politics to strengthen the position of those groups that represent these interest, values, or goals.
Consequently, for Lindblom policies are not always the outcomes of decision-making processes in which the preferences of electoral majorities are decisive. Instead, policies habitually come about in an ongoing negotiation process between passionate minorities. Nevertheless, the resulting policies to a large extent reflect the prevailing values and beliefs in society and usually can count on the support of majorities. In addition, Lindblom argues that a political decision-making process in which many independent civil organizations participate, not just prevents the concentration and abuse of power, which is the usual perspective of the pluralists; he argues that such a decision process also brings forth significantly more rational, more balanced and legitimate policies than hierarchically-controlled systems. The elaboration and justification of these theses is the leitmotif of Lindblom’s work in the 1960s and 1970s. This happens especially in his A Strategy of Decision: Policy Evaluation as a Social Process (1963), The Intelligence of Democracy: Decision Making through Mutual Adjustment (1965) and The Policy-Making Process (1968).
It is noteworthy that many of the ideas on policy making that Lindblom developed in the 1950s and 1960s became almost commonplace in the 1980s and 1990s. Lindblom himself, though, got in another state of mind. Manifestations of this are Politics and Markets: The World’s Political-Economic Systems (1977), his APSA-presidential address “Another State of Mind” (1982), Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society (1990) and The Market System: What it Is, How it Works, and What to Make of It (2000).
In the sixties, Lindblom seemed to suggest, along with many other pluralists, that there were no groups or institutions on the policy market that possessed significant privileged negotiating positions. When this would be the case, a new interest or pressure group would almost automatically develop to recover the balance. In his later work, this suggestion goes unequivocally off the table. Corporations in particular have incomparably more political resources (money, knowledge, organization, networks) and therefore political power, than other interest groups. In addition, and importantly, their representatives will always find a more than willing ear at the government, which for its public legitimacy has become highly dependent on the functioning of the private sector. Governments fall at high unemployment rates, and in their communications with government, corporations therefore have a “priviliged position.”
Lindblom also considers it naive to assume that companies are entirely at the mercy of the market and that therefore ultimately consumers decide their policies. Entrepreneurs take many decisions with far-reaching consequences for individuals, groups, and even societies, on which the market, or the consumers, hardly have any influence. This includes decisions about the location, the technology to be used, the product development or innovation, the staffing of the management, the remuneration structure, or labor relations. In our liberal political systems, the decision authority over these social issues has been largely transferred to individual entrepreneurs. Consequently, according to Lindblom, these systems have two de facto elites: a political elite that still somewhat, but much too limited, can be held accountable by the citizens, and an economic elite, that largely has free rein. The economic elite has a huge influence on the values and ideas in which people are socialized, values and ideas which invariably confirm the power position of the elites.
The economic elite did not like Politics and Markets. The oft-cited final words of the book are: “The large private corporation fits oddly into democratic theory and vision. Indeed it does not fit.” When democracy means that those who exert power should be democratically accountable, then corporations should also be put under democratic control. Likewise, democracies should not allow corporations to use their resources to influence public opinion. Corporations are not citizens. There was considerable irony then when Mobil Oil Corporation bought a lengthy ad in the New York Times on February 2, 1978 to criticize the book and its author. Lindblom wrote a response, but was informed that it would only be published if he paid for the ad.
The same willingness Lindblom demonstrates to rethink earlier positions is also shown when contemplating the kinds of knowledge that the social and political sciences are able to produce. He was years ahead with his severe criticism on the ways the social and political sciences have made themselves socially and politically irrelevant and with his inquiries into what kinds of usable knowledge would really contribute to the needed changes in our societies. Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society (1990) and Usable Knowledge: Social Science and Social Problem Solving (1979), written together with David Cohen, exemplify this.
As part of his overall examination of the uses of knowledge in society, Lindblom had an abiding concern about the impact of defective knowledge upon citizens, students, voters, and consumers. This concern stemmed from several sources, prominent among them a skepticism, long developing in him, toward authority and presumed-to-be authoritative knowledge. In Slices, his self-published memoirs from 2004 (free available at www.lulu.com), Lindblom writes that while in college at Stanford, he “abandoned faith . . . as a disposition to believe in anything without some empirical tests, and, in addition, faith considered as a virtue. I opted for skepticism and inquiry” (71).
Many years later, in Inquiry and Change, Lindblom thoroughly laid out the complex process of impairment of knowledge in various areas of life, including politics and political science. Regarding the current mass media, he stated that they mostly amplify the power of elites to disseminate, misrepresent, deceive, and obfuscate on a vast scale; and, in so doing, they transform the power of elites to influence people and impair their knowledge (1990: 100–117). In an interview Blokland had with Lindblom in November 2000, he powerfully summarized his position on elites and impairment:
”[I see] a long, long historical process of an intermittent, unending struggle of masses trying to restrict elites and elites trying to preserve their advantages. This is not a unusual idea, but a very standard interpretation....Obviously there is much more to social history than this, but it is a crucial element. Elites maintain their advantages most effectively by pretty crude threats of violence and violence....These methods, though, are rather costly and relatively ineffective. So the elites have to find more humane, less objectionable, less conspicuous, and less, now outright illegal, methods. And so, as a principal device for maintaining their advantages, they try to capture the mind. They preach the gospel of deference, competence, obedience, the merits of hierarchy, the merits of inequality, the dangers of equality, the dangers of skepticism, and the need for faith....It all adds up to, not a deliberate conspiracy, but a kind of tacit understanding of what elites perceive are the messages that are most effective for maintaining their favored position in society. And you see the efficacy of it in the extent to which it succeeds. We have a society, which....is deeply suspicious of equality, even though it seems obvious that having more equality would be very much an advantage. A society today can be easily stirred up by fears of more equality. You see societies committed to a deep respect for hierarchy and deference to political leadership. You see it in the both irrational and deeply dangerous commitment to nationalism and patriotism....My argument is that nobody escapes the onslaught, the unilateralness of the messages, subtle, explicit and implicit, hidden and open, to teach these alleged virtues. That the elites come to believe them, of course, themselves, I mean they impair their own capacity to think straight. And that these impairments, these incapacities to see the world clearly, to appraise such alleged virtues as hierarchy, obedience, faith, inequality, representing a kind of floor-level, ground-level impairment of our capacity to act straight even in political and economic policy. We don’t have good economies, we don’t have good political systems, we do not have good policies because we are so impaired in our capacity to appraise and design good policies.”
Even later in life (2013), Lindblom commented on the ”mammoth corruptions and denials of today,” suggesting that he perceived a new regime of political dishonesty and indoctrination from what he had subsumed under the heading of “circularity in polyarchy” back in 1977. He leaves behind an illuminating paradigm for exploring processes of impairment of knowledge; but great increases in recent years in the production and magnitude of defective information and disinformation may call for revsions that ratchet up this framework.
THE PHENOMENON OF POLYARCHY
Among his contributions to pluralist theory, we would be remiss if we failed to mention his contribution, along with Dahl, to giving a name to democracies as they exist in the real world. They felt it important to distinguish such systems from ideal democracy or the direct democracy of ancient Athens. And they made the impactful decision to call this phenomenon “polyarchy,” meaning pluralistic rule. Language’s power is such that the term was fixed in the mind as an essential connection between democracy and pluralism. And the term gained considerable currency in the field. How well has it held up in recent years? Increasingly, extreme political inequality in the US could render continued use of the term polyarchy problematic. Since extreme political inequality could undermine pluralism or overwhelm it, some scholars now limit their use of the term “polyarchy” or even abandon it, applying instead terms like oligarchy or plutocracy to the United States.
Did astronomic rise in political inequality in recent years lead Lindblom to doubt that polyarchy is still the right word for designating the American political system? Did he think polyarchy could still be maintained under such extreme conditions of political inequality? Comments that he made in recent email exchanges—like “Every day becomes more frightening . . . What is in store for great grandchildren?”, and “down, endlessly down” do not leave one sanguine on the matter.
AS A “MARKETIST”
Conservative critics of Lindblom have found it informative to point out that Lindblom is a closet collectivist, socialist, or communist. In fact, Lindblom did not have much use for the terms capitalism and socialism. He preferred instead to devise a different set of economic system types, including market-oriented private enterprise systems, socialist market systems, planner sovereignty market systems, consumer sovereignty systems, among others. These alternatives show that he distinguished the basic alternative systems into different forms of markets rather than different forms of property; and that he distinguished these forms of markets by the extent to which authority replaced market in each one, not so much by the extent to which they either relied on social or private property, though this was still a factor to some degree. Thus downplaying property, both private and social, he could not have been in the vanguard of socialism. Moreover, he was non-committal as far as private and socials forms of property, neither arguing for private property nor for social property; and you cannot be a socialist or a capitalist if you do not take a stand on property. As disappointing as it may be to anyone seeking to provoke ideological conflict, the closest Lindblom gets to being a Marxist is in being a “Marketist,”—someone with a deep faith in markets, despite serious qualms arising from their many defects. As a political economist, what he was promoting was careful, judicious, non-ideological—that is, pragmatic—consideration of the extent to which market should replace authority, or vice versa. By setting forth a slew of alternative political-economic systems, rather than seeking to prove the superiority of one over another, he laid the foundations for two new fields of inquiry: varieties of democracy and markets, and varieties of capitalism.
AN OUTSTANDING CHARACTER
When Lindblom discussed academic topics, he was ruthlessly looking for answers and truth. He could not always hide his “disappointment” when people came up with views that did not really make sense. He always asked the next, and ultimately the last question: “How do you know?” You need a stomach to endure this, and many people did not always have it, as Lindblom himself realized. When he was at work, he did not have much patience, but as soon as work was over, he was one of the kindest and most attentive men we ever met. Also for this reason, he was celebrated by his students. He was known for commenting in great detail on papers and thesis drafts, making himself available for one-on-one meetings, writing eloquent recommendations, assisting them in their job search, and in general, sticking by them for the duration. Lindblom was invaluable to his students for the knowledge of the subject matter that he would impart. But students would also learn how high academic standards could be—which was no less valuable to them intellectually. In conversation, Lindblom would train his cold gray-blue eyes upon them with an intensity of concentration that made the gaze of other people seem idle. His look conveyed that you were expected to do your very best work; that, if ever you could say something profound, this was the time to do it; and that, if you couldn’t, don’t even think about wasting his time. Students quickly found that they were being taken more seriously than they had ever been before. This respect and seriousness inspired students to go beyond their known capacities.
In his private life, Lindblom was cherished for his capacity for friendship. Most important here, obviously, was his wife Rose Winther, who was the love and inspiration of his life. “I have neither had nor wanted my own life since Rose and I wed over 60 years ago,” he wrote in Slices (2004: 10). “Life with Rose,” he wrote after her death in 2003, “was life in a garden now closed” (2004: 10). She was his companion, confidant, restorer, adviser, and friend. The death of Rose after 50 years of marriage was devastating to him. But after an extended period of intense grief, he somehow managed to pull through, enjoying a good part of his final decade and a half of life.
“Ed” was a person of absolutely outstanding character. He believed in “mutual adjustment” and he was appreciative of his colleagues’ talents and accomplishments, but, in the end, he made his own judgments no matter what anybody else thought and no matter what convention stood in the way. He always went with what he thought was right and true, not just in the world of ideas, but also in personal life. He was no bending reed. Integrity was the path he’d chosen in life, and, where most people are corruptible to some degree, straying from this path was out of the question for him. Honesty was his policy. The current era of mendacity, he must have found appalling, so antithetical to him it was.
One has to reach for extremes if one wants to capture who this man was. Ordinary just was not him. He was a kind of extremist—not of the sort we see in politics today, but one who was extremely good, kind, generous to a fault, objective as a person could be, extremely learned and able, and yes, acutely aware of the need for mutual adjustment.
We, like many others in his wide circle of colleagues, friends, and former students, sorely regret his passing even as we rejoice in having had the privilege of knowing him.
—Hans Blokland, Social Science Works
—Rune Premfors, Stockholm University
—Ross Zucker, Touro College and University System
Louis “Tracy” Bolce
The Political Science Department at Baruch College, City University of New York, is saddened to announce the sudden passing of our friend and colleague Louis “Tracy” Bolce on November 24th, 2017. Tracy, a native of Ohio, was educated at the University of Cincinnati. He concentrated on public opinion, political parties, and elections.
Tracy’s early work in the 1970s focused on urban riots and the emerging African American middle class. In a series of articles with Abraham Miller and Mark Halligan in the American Political Science Review and Ethnicity, they tested the J-Curve thesis’s applicability to the riots of the 1960s. It generated a lively debate among social scientists. This was followed by a subsequent article with Susan Gray in The Public Interest which called into question the extent of polarization among blacks and whites and diversity in the African American community on issues such as affirmative action.
At Baruch, Tracy was involved in projects addressing the determinants contributing to the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, African American voting behavior, and the Christian Fundamentalist factor in contemporary American politics. These also found outlets in well regarded journals. The finding were disseminated by journalists in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, US News & World Report, the Atlantic, The Wilson Quarterly, and many others.
The ERA papers (with Gerald De Maio and Douglas Muzzio) focused on the impact that intensity and nationally distributed majorities, articulated by political theorists Willmoore Kendall and Martin Diamond, had on the amendment’s defeat. The empirical findings demonstrated that relatively small numbers in the public were intensely involved and that the amendment failed to achieve nationally distributed majorities crucial to success. In a related paper for Social Science Quarterly, the impact of dissonance that the abortion issue had on ERA supporters was delineated.
During the era when the gender gap surfaced, focusing on the Democrats’ advantage with women, Tracy’s article in Presidential Studies Quarterly called attention to a “reverse gender gap” among men favoring Republicans.
Tracy and his colleagues also examined the presence of bloc voting in the African American electorate and explored ideology and class factors that might lead to a “20% solution” and Republican victories. They found scant evidence for this, a fact later verified in elections since 1964.
In the 1990s, Tracy contributed an early article on the “talk radio” phenomenon, which has spawned a great deal of literature over the last 20 years, calling attention to this trend in democratic discourse.
During the last phase in his career, Tracy focused on the culture wars and the role of religion in political polarization. An article he published with De Maio in The Public Interest, calling attention to the secularist trend in the Democratic Party, received much attention in the media and has become a staple in discussions of party coalitions. A particular interest in the culture wars and polarization arena was on the anti-Christian fundamentalist factor in American politics and how it has become an important determinant in voting behavior. The results, published in Public Opinion Quarterly, American Politics Research, The Public Interest, and in more popular journals, garnered considerable attention and are widely cited in the academic literature.
Most recently, Tracy had been researching media portrayals of conservative Christians and secularists. His data revealed that there has been a paucity of stories identifying seculars with the Democratic Party compared with the Christian Fundamentalist–Republican Party nexus.
Tracy was a good friend and colleague who took his departmental responsibilities very seriously. He would stop by colleagues’ office to chat about academic issues, current politics, and topics of a more general nature. We will miss him, and we extend our condolences to his wife Natasha and his family in Ohio.
—David Jones, Baruch College, City University of New York
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Zbigniew Brzezinski, assistant to the president for national security affairs from 1977–1981, was born on March 27, 1928 in Warsaw, Poland, and died on May 26, 2017 in Falls Church, Virginia, at age 89. He is survived by his wife Emilie, sons Ian and Mark, and daughter Mika.
Brzezinski’s father Tadeusz, a senior Polish diplomat, was posted to Berlin in 1931, Kharkov (Soviet Ukraine) in 1936, and Montreal in 1938. Most of Zbigniew’s childhood years were in Germany, where he and his father precociously observed and assessed Nazification. His teenage years were in Canada, where he earned a BA and a MA at McGill University.
Brzezinski completed PhD studies at Harvard University in 1953 and expanded his scholarly agenda at Harvard’s Russian Research Center until 1960. He then joined Columbia University’s Department of Public Law and Government (now Department of Political Science), Russian Institute (now Harriman Institute), and Research Institute on Communist Affairs (now Research Institute on International Change, or RIIC), which he directed from 1960 to 1976.
RIIC featured luncheon seminars, which Brzezinski invariably introduced with timely and knotty questions and propositions and which members and guests utilized to discuss and debate academic and pragmatic themes. Also, Brzezinski worked at the Council on Foreign Relations (e.g., wrote 35 articles in Foreign Affairs), and he headed the Trilateral Commission (e.g., linked American, West European, and Japanese elites). These two organizations and RIIC augmented Brzezinski’s preparation for leadership of the National Security Council (NSC).
Brzezinski recounted his White House experiences in multilevel memoirs, which ranged from idealistic policy goals to mechanistic administrative methods and which detailed interaction with “key players,” including top military aide, RIIC’s William E. Odom. After public service, Brzezinski returned to Columbia, soon joined the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and later joined the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).
BOOKS BY BRZEZINSKI
Brzezinski’s path-breaking and wide-ranging scholarly and policy books highlighted his views on Soviet and Communist politics. He interrelates and interconnects comparative and international studies, which include crossnational comparisons and probabilistic generalizations. He also blends and bonds contextual and situational studies, which include crosstemporal comparisons and detailed descriptions. And he conflates and conjoins general empirical studies and geographical area studies, which include analysis of Soviet political culture and Soviet socioeconomic development as well as Soviet imperialism in Eastern Europe and Soviet-American Cold War rivalry.
Brzezinski’s magnum opus is The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (1960, 1967). This book describes and explains five phases of uniformity and diversity in Soviet relations with its East European satellites and with China, Yugoslavia, Albania, and Cuba in the world communist movement from1945 to1967. The book transcends academic specializations and traditions by interweaving and intertwining substantive components and by engaging methodological themes in the concluding chapter, which emphasizes descriptive foundations of explanative propositions. It also clarifies key concepts (e.g., power, ideology, de-Stalinization, and desatellization), mixes topical analyses and chronological narratives, infers motives and beliefs of political actors, and underscores the domestic sources of Soviet foreign policy.
Other important works by Brzezinski include the following: Political Power: USA/USSR, with coauthor Samuel P. Huntington (1964). The book adds Soviet data and experience to crossnational comparisons of policymaking and implementation, contrasts ideological and instrumental politics, and compares structures and functions of the American and Soviet political systems. It also presents comparative case studies that discover and verify hypotheses. And it rejects notions of “converging” American and Soviet democratization and marketization.
Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (1970) envisions a worldwide communication and information revolution beginning soon after World War II. The book calls for expanding American leadership in the design and production of innovative computers and telecommunications. It identifies “alterative paths” and combinations of paths for Soviet multidimensional development. It also anticipates reciprocal influences of political, economic, and social variables and presumes the primacy of politics in R&D decisions.
The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1990) forecasts the imminent demise of the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union. The book excoriates Lenin and Stalin for violent state-building and socioeconomic engineering. It contends that public criticism of “the Leninist legacy” and “the Stalinist catastrophe” would subvert the legitimacy and stability of the Soviet political system and that democratic federalism and market capitalism could not take root in the Soviet Union because they emboldened and empowered non-Russian separatists.
Furthermore, Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century (1993) voices “an urgent warning” about the globalization of “a spiritual crisis.” The book appeals for “a profound reassessment of basic political and social values” and condemns the “organized insanity” of “coercive utopias,” whose dictators strive for “total control” of cultural and social norms and of ideological and governmental forms. It deplores the savagery and zealotry of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler, who produced distinctive communist and noncommunist totalitarian revolutions.
TEN THEMES OF SOVIET POLITICS
From Brzezinski’s copious writings, I have extracted ten themes of Soviet politics: (1) Soviet Studies, Political Science, and Concepts of Power and Ideology; (2) Characteristics and Uses of Concepts of Totalitarianism; (3) Tsarist Traditions and Leninist/Stalinist Foundations of Soviet Russia; (4) Soviet Political Development and State-Society Relations; (5) De-Stalinization of Policymaking and Implementation; (6) Bureaucratization, Stagnation, and Liberalization after Stalin; (7) Nationalism and Separatism in Soviet Satellites and Soviet Republics; (8) Fragmentation and Disintegration of the Soviet Bloc and the Soviet Union; (9) American Military Power and Cold War Victory; and (10) Totalitarian Revolutions and Megadeath Wars in the Twentieth Century.
Brzezinski elucidated and elaborated these ten themes in scholarly and policy analyses, and his most consequential and controversial assertion is perhaps the following response in a conversation with a longtime colleague and friend, Charles Gati.
Brzezinski: I was always for a policy which allowed us to prevail in the Cold War, and to do it by a strategy of what I called peaceful engagement. We engage them. We deal with the regimes. We penetrate the societies. We begin to exploit the fissures between the Central Europeans and the Russians. We eventually break up the Soviet Union from within....
Gati: Of all your accomplishments, what are you most proud of?
Brzezinski: I guess I feel best about the way the Cold War ended, without bloodshed and with success, and I think that was something to which I made a contribution. I’m not claiming it was thanks to me, but I think I contributed to the eventual outcome. And ending the Cold War without something like World War III was a blessing, and that’s historically as important, perhaps even more important, as prevailing. So I feel very good about that (in Charles Gati, ed., Zbig: The Strategy and Statecraft of Zbigniew Brzezinski [2013], 232-233).
One can share or not share the worldview of Zbigniew Brzezinski, but comparison of one’s views with Brzezinski’s can be exceptionally fruitful. His lucid conceptualization and cogent argumentation can enhance one’s knowledge and understanding of the tsarist Russian and Soviet Russian political systems and of their multidimensional legacies to the post-Soviet Russian system in the increasingly fractious and fissiparous international arena of the post-Cold War era.
—Erik P. Hoffmann, State University of New York at Albany
Jennifer Nicole Rice
It is nature’s way that younger people write memorials for their elders and we all feel the tragedy when nature’s way is reversed. Jennifer Nicole Rice (1984–2017), full of promise, was only 33 when she died in Arlington, VA on December 23, 2017, after a nine month battle with Glioblastoma brain cancer.
Jennifer received an MPA in Policy Analysis, International Development, and Sustainable Development from the School of Environmental and Public Affairs (SPEA) at Indiana University in 2014. She was an excellent student with broad interests ranging from dance (dance was part of her undergraduate major and her teaching field as an adjunct faculty member at Indiana), to local politics, and to international trade. Her internships included one with the Robert Schuman Stagiaire Program, working in the European Parliament Liaison Office with the US Congress. Her last employment was with the US Department of Commerce where she was a trade and industry analyst in the Bureau of Industry and Technology’s Office of Technology.
Jennifer saw herself as on the road to a professional career in political science that would be based on her continuing interests in public policy and international trade and development. To fulfill those aspirations she knew that a PhD was needed. This led her to ask for guidance from a mentor and APSA brought us together in September 2015. She outlined her agenda and asked for advice on how to begin publishing and when and where to apply to a PhD program. We began regular contact through email, telephone, and one in-person meeting. Her intelligence and enthusiasm were immediately apparent and I was confident she could achieve her goals. Her dilemma was how to reconcile her growing list of achievements from her work in the Department of Commerce with recognition that she would have to, if even in the short-term, disengage from that work in order to complete a PhD.
We explored different possibilities and then, quite suddenly, there was silence from her end. My messages were eventually met with news that she had felt unable to proceed because of persistent headaches that had been diagnosed as symptoms of brain cancer. She brought the same intellectual and persevering qualities that so impressed me to this new problem and opted for the newest and most aggressive treatments. Ever thoughtful of others, she asked her mother, Julie Harris, to keep me informed of her progress.
Jennifer is survived by her father George Rice, her mother Julie Harris, her brother Chris, her fiancé Angelo Bardeles, and many friends and relatives. Her family welcomes contributions in Jennifer’s name to the Indiana University Foundation SPEA Greater Good Internship Fund (speainfo@indiana.edu).
Although Jennifer’s ambitions to make a mark on political science were never realized, limiting her stature among the usual list of political scientists we memorialize in these pages, her brief life was memorable in its own way. Her warmth, charm, intellectual curiosity, courage, and industry ensure remembrance by all who knew her and her memory will inspire comfort to all who mourn her.
—Mildred A. Schwartz, University of Illinois Chicago and New York University
Carl E. Shepro
University of Alaska professor Carl E. Shepro died in Anchorage on May 2, 2017. In an Alaska life of nearly 40 years, Carl worked in most parts of the state—as teacher, researcher, and union leader. He left a deep impression on those he met and served, and he will be sorely missed.
Born in Seattle in 1941, Carl attended school in the city. He took a BA degree at Seattle University and both an MA and a PhD in political science at the University of Washington. For several years during and after his doctoral study, he taught classes at Bellevue Community College. In late 1979, with his wife Kathleen and three boys, Carl ventured north to Alaska. For the first six years, he taught at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). Then, for several years, he taught at Ilisagvik College in Barrow (now renamed Utqiagvik), where he served for two years as academic coordinator. Starting in 1988, he rose through the ranks at the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA), retiring in 2011 as professor of political science emeritus.
Although Professor Shepro’s specialization in graduate school had been in urban politics, in the course of his career he expanded his teaching portfolio to include US government, state and local politics, political economy, institutions (Congress and legislatures, the presidency, and bureaucracy), Alaska politics, Native politics, political processes (especially political parties, elections, and interest groups), political theory, and even comparative politics. He brought to teaching not only a vast knowledge and the ability to apply it, but also an intellectual curiosity easily transmitted to students. He related comfortably to students, quickly earning their respect and trust.
RESEARCH
Professor Shepro’s research was significant, valuable, and timely. His early investigations on rural education and Alaska political parties were insightful and revealing. He organized and carried out seven large census and economic surveys of the Arctic Slope, compiling important statistical and qualitative data on demographic trends, employment, income, poverty, education, housing, subsistence, and language. He was an integral part of a four-year study assessing the impact of oil and gas exploration and production on Bowhead whaling and other hunting and fishing activities in three North Slope communities and a control village, Savoonga on Saint Lawrence Island. His work on congressional campaigns in Alaska and environmental issues in the Arctic received national attention. He was selected to evaluate Project Sivunum, a three-year culture and language program adopted by the North Slope Borough School District with funding from the US Department of Education.
Yet Professor Shepro knew the political science literature and contributed many studies to it: of the dynamic relations between local and state governments; of institutions from local councils, mayoral administrations, and state legislatures to Congress and national bureaucracy; and of elections changing the fortunes of individuals, groups, and parties. Fruits of his research appeared in an array of publications—refereed journal articles, book chapters, reviews, and research reports. His writings drew connections across subdisciplines of political science and linked government and politics closely to other fields, such as anthropology and sociology.
Much of Professor Shepro’s university and community service revolved around students’ needs and interests. He was adviser to the student Political Science Association, Pi Sigma Alpha, the Student Showcase Committee, the Native Student Service Advisory Committee, the Native Higher Education Committee, the College of Arts and Sciences Multicultural Curriculum Committee, the Middle East Awareness Club, and the Social Science Outcomes Assessment Committee. He established formal working relationships with the Northern Studies Program in Fairbanks and the University of British Columbia’s School of Social and Education Studies in Vancouver, helping Alaskan students pursue graduate work with less disruption to their private lives. As faculty representative for the James Madison and Harry S. Truman Scholarship programs, he assisted students in gaining financial aid for graduate study. He chaired the Polaris and Bartlett Lecture Committees, which invited speakers to the university for lectures and workshops.
Professor Shepro was instrumental in bridging relations between the university and the community. He was on the board of directors of the Alaska State Community Service Commission, an affiliate of the Corporation for National Service. He was instrumental in developing a state plan to link service programs and interns to local initiatives. As coordinator of the Legislative Internship Program at UAA for four years, he placed more than 70 students in legislative offices in Juneau. Former interns now serve as aides for legislators, civil servants, community activists, legislators, and attorneys. He also arranged and supervised scores of internship appointments in government and nonprofit agencies throughout the state and in Washington, DC.
For six years Professor Shepro was president of United Academics. He was instrumental in developing the statewide faculty union and was its most effective, innovative, and respected leader. His familiarity with the university and all of its components, his knowledge of Alaska politics and the intricacies of the legislative process in Juneau, and his sense of fairness and respect for others was unmatched. He did more than anyone to defend the interests and the integrity of the faculty and to promote collegiality, mutual understanding, and cooperation with the administration of the University of Alaska.
Carl was a delightful colleague. Having survived a lung transplant, he had a highly positive view of life, coupled with an infectious sense of humor and a dry wit. Although he willingly shared his experience and friendships with colleagues, he never sought to replace their judgments and perspectives with his own. He was a solidly decent man, whom one could trust without reservation.
Carl was a loving husband, father, and grandfather; he is survived by his wife Kathleen; his children Maria Domann (husband John and sons Grant and Turner), Michael Spillane (wife Heidi and children Ella and Owen), Dan Spillane (wife Michelle and children Aubrey and Nolan), and Joe Spillane; and his sister Susan Greer.
—David C. Maas, University of Alaska, Anchorage
—Jerry McBeath, University of Alaska, Fairbanks
—James W. Muller, University of Alaska, Anchorage
Harold J. Spaeth
It’s nearly impossible to believe that, when folks read this column, Harold will have been gone for a year. He was such a monumental presence in the field of judicial politics, and we miss him, very much, already.
Harold J. Spaeth was a true pioneer of judicial behavior (Maveety 2003). He was among the first to quantify the Court’s decisions, and among the most ardent critics of the legal model, recognizing early on that there was much more afoot when the justices cast their votes than mere plain language or precedent. But what made Harold a consummate scholar was his penchant to put his money where his mouth was, so to speak. He argued against the legal model, saying that it was untestable, but then was among the first to cleverly devise a means by which to test one of its primary arguments is his award-winning Majority Rule or Minority Will (Spaeth and Segal 2001). This was the game Harold played: He argued his positions absolutely, challenging any who disagree, but then happily conceded when his naysayers could prove that their position was the better. His absolutism was a ruse, cultivated to challenge people (creatures, he’d call them, so as not to offend anyone with sexist pronouns) to do the hard work necessary to make scientifically valid claims. That is not to say that it would not take a lot of proof to convince Harold that he was wrong and another scholar right, but it was certainly not impossible to do so, because the most important thing to Harold was “the truth” and he firmly believed it could be discerned via social science analysis.
Harold had no undergraduate courses in political science and much of his vast understanding of quantitative methods and Supreme Court decision making was self-taught. Glendon Schubert was a major influence on him (Schubert brought Harold to Michigan State) and Harold considered Schubert’s Quantitative Analysis of Judicial Behavior to be the most influential, indeed the best, book in public law ever written. The two of them fought hard to gain acceptance, even mere consideration, of what now, because of their work, seems like a simple assertion: that Supreme Court justices make decisions in accordance with their attitudes. Spaeth recalled conferences in the 1960s wherein he or Schubert would present papers that turned into veritable “lynch mobs,” the audience appalled with their blasphemous assertions about the Justices (Benesh 2003). One can only imagine their reaction to Harold’s syndicated Supreme Court Computer column, which predicted (quite well!) the Supreme Court’s cases each term, bringing the ideas inherent in the attitudinal model to the public writ large.
But perhaps Spaeth’s most obvious legacy is his database (now databases), used in nearly every quantitative study of the Supreme Court conducted and modeled by other databases compiling the decisions of other courts (the Courts of Appeals, the state supreme courts, the high courts of other countries). Spaeth’s database was “born of conceit,” according to him, when he was frustrated with the poor data being used in quantitative papers of the day and annoyed with the redundant collection of data (Benesh 2003, 129). Beginning in 1983, and supported by the National Science Foundation, Spaeth began to quantify various aspects of the Supreme Court’s decisions, which he read from his subscription to the Lawyer’s Edition hardcopies, coding cases on index cards kept in his office. With continued NSF support and some assistance by a few other scholars (always supervised carefully by Harold), the database has grown and modernized, now including over 200 pieces of information on every case decided by the Supreme Court from 1791 through the current term, housed in an easy-to-use format at http://scdb.wustl.edu/. Scholars involved in the new website’s creation and the backdating and upkeep of the databases (Lee Epstein, Ted Ruger, Jeffrey Segal, Andrew Martin, and Sara Benesh) have committed to continually updating the database, using Spaeth’s careful and reliable coding. Spaeth’s legacy will be ever-enduring.
Harold had a happy marriage of 53 years to his college sweetheart Jean, and, after he lost Jean, found happiness again in a lovely relationship with Mary Ann Dunn. He was proud of his four children, Hal, Susan, Catherine, and Esther, and marveled over his seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. He was a cerebral gent, and a curmudgeon, but he had a beautiful heart. Academic meetings haven’t been the same since he stopped attending. There is nothing like seeing the great and towering Harold Spaeth stride into a panel, settle in, and prepare to call out sloppiness. No one will ever take his place.
—Sara C. Benesh, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
S. Sidney Ulmer
S. Sidney Ulmer, 94, was a pioneer in the study of judicial behavior. He was also the “founder” of the modern political science department at the University of Kentucky. An emeritus professor, he passed away at his home in Lexington on January 19, 2018. Although frail of body, his mind was sharp and lucid to the end. He was born on April 15, 1923, in North, South Carolina, to Shirley S. and Anna Reed Ulmer. Sid came of age as America entered World War II and he served in the Army Air Force as a tail gunner on B-24 bombers for 44 missions during 1943–45 in the South Pacific. He earned a number of medals and citations and afterward he was an active member of the 31st Bomb Squadron Assn.
Following the war, Sid worked his way through Furman University with the help of the GI Bill, graduating cum laude in 1952. He then went on to earn an MA (1954) and PhD (1956) in Political Science at Duke. He took a position at Michigan State (1956–63) which had an up and coming young faculty in the late ‘50s and ‘60s. Among them were Glendon Schubert and Harold Spaeth who, contrary to the traditional doctrinal approach of seeing judges as objective appliers of the Constitution and laws, were quantifying the study of Supreme Court justices’ voting behavior from an attitudinal theory approach. Sid began approaching justices quantitatively, but relied more on small group interaction theory and used more sophisticated statistical tools.
In 1963, Sid became chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Kentucky with a mandate to bring it into the new world of political behavior. This was quite a challenge. The department, like many in the South, had been a rather sleepy one, making little impact on the profession at the time. But times were flush for academia in the 1960s—even in Kentucky—so Sid had the wherewithal to recruit and the additional slots to fill. He doubled the department’s size in his six years as chair. Nine new faculty alone came to campus in 1966. Some became prominent in the profession. Sid stepped down as chair in 1969 and returned to research—well, increased his research activity as he had been doing quite a bit of it while chair. But the momentum he created in bringing research-oriented colleagues to Kentucky continued unabated during the 1970s under succeeding chairs. In the late 1960s and onward research by Kentucky faculty was appearing in all the major journals.
Sid was a prolific researcher. “Toward a Theory of Sub-Group Formation in the US Supreme Court” (Journal of Politics, 1965), “Dissent Behavior in the US Supreme Court” (Journal of Politics, 1970), and “Selecting Cases for Supreme Court Review: An Underdog Model” (American Political Science Review, 1978) are classic examples of his best known behavioral work. Most of Sid’s work was theoretically oriented. He believed that political science was a science—not as precise as physics, perhaps, but reasonably explainable through the application of testable theories explaining human behavior. Indeed, when a candidate for a position presented his or her research, Sid’s first question was frequently, “What is your theory?”
But not all of Sid’s work was quantitative. “Earl Warren and the Brown Decision” (Journal of Politics, 1971) used the justices’ papers to explore the Chief Justice’s influence. Some articles probed into the politics of the 1787 Constitutional Convention. He wrote about political influences on the Illinois and Michigan supreme courts and about some aspects of military justice. All in all, he published 56 journal articles, all but a handful peer reviewed. Additionally, he authored 21 contributions in edited books. He wrote four books and edited three others. In honor of his research accomplishments, Sid was presented the “Lifetime Achievement Award” by APSA’s Law & Courts Section in 2003. In 1976, he was named the College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor.
Sid preferred to conduct research alone even after collaboration became more common in political science. His graduate students were occasional coauthors. Sid and I collaborated on one APSR commentary on the Supreme Court and critical elections because we discovered while talking at a departmental picnic that we were both writing on this topic. He supervised a number of dissertations and some of his PhDs did him proud.
Sid was quite active in the profession. He served as President of the Southern Political Science Association in 1971–1972 and program chair for both the SPSA and the Midwest Political Science Association and on the nominating committees for these associations as well as the APSA at one time or another. He served terms on the editorial boards of the APSR, the Journal of Politics, and the American Journal of Political Science, and there was service on other professional committees too numerous to mention. He was also active on campus. Sid’s longest service was 17 years as chair or board member of the UK Credit Union. He was elected to the UK Senate Council (executive committee) in the 1970s. After retiring, he served a few years as treasurer of the Emeriti Faculty Assn.
After reading the above, one might think that teaching was an afterthought for Sid. Not so! He regularly taught the Introduction to Judicial Processes course and sometimes taught Civil Liberties in the US, both very heavily subscribed. And there was an occasional undergraduate (small enrollment) special topics course. Of course, he taught graduate seminars in judicial process and judicial behavior. Sid put a lot of effort into class preparation and he twice won the Pi Sigma Alpha chapter’s Outstanding Teacher Award. He also received the annual campus-wide award for making an outstanding contribution to graduate education.
Although a rather serious person, Sid’s sense of humor would come out on occasion. With a straight face, he could play a practical joke or lead a colleague on. Or there was the occasional bit of dry humor. Once when I was telling Sid that I would be spending the coming summer helping begin a social science college at the University of Palembang in Indonesia, he replied, “Hmm, I’ve never been there. (pause) But I bombed it once.”
Sid retired in 1988 at age 65. He attended the annual department awards presentation dinner for the next 25 or so years, but otherwise paid little attention to departmental affairs. After a while, I would have lunch with him once a month or so, often with other colleagues. We’d fill him in on major happenings in the department and university and discuss other topics ranging from the Supreme Court’s latest decisions (something Sid remained quite interested in) to remembering the department and university in the 1960s and 1970s to various investment strategies. As a retiree, Sid spent more time at his hobbies of woodworking and gardening.
As a product of the Deep South, Sid was unfailingly polite with his colleagues and acquaintances. His wife Margaret, also a South Carolinian, was ever the gracious lady. She predeceased him, passing away in 2012. Five children survive, Margaret Moye and Mary Ulmer-Jones, both of Atlanta, William Emmett Ulmer of Coarsegold, CA, Susan Blake of Lexington, and John Lipscomb Ulmer of Brookfield, WI. There are 13 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. Contributions in his memory may be made to the S. Sidney and Margaret L. Ulmer Endowed Scholarship Fund, Sturgill Bldg., University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506–0015.
—Bradley C. Canon, University of Kentucky
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