Nelson Polsby, Heller Professor of Political Science and former director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at Berkeley, passed away on February 6, 2007, at the age of 72. He was a prominent member of a renowned graduate cohort group that studied under Robert Dahl at Yale in the fifties and included his long-time Berkeley colleagues Raymond Wolfinger and Aaron Wildavsky. After briefly teaching at the University of Wisconsin and Wesleyan University, Nelson joined the University of California, Berkeley faculty in 1967, where he remained until his death. Nelson received many honors during his illustrious career, including honorary degrees from the University of Liverpool (1992) and the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan (2001), election to the American Academy of Arts and Science (1982), and the Frank Goodnow Award (2003) for Distinguished Service to the Political Science Profession. He was managing editor of the American Political Science Review from 1971–1977 and served on the editorial board of 21 other journals. His death was widely reported by the press in the U.S. and Europe, including a lengthy obituary in the Times of London.
Nelson was a preeminent scholar and public intellectual, a sage man with a devastating wit, and a beloved mentor to his closest graduate students. Famous but insecure, kind but gruff, an Anglophile who was disdainful of his faux aristocratic prep school classmates, and an iconoclast with a Burkean fear of drastic change, Nelson was endlessly fascinating because of his many contradictory traits and unique talents. Writing at a time when technical specialization was the surest path to success, Nelson's scholarly career and intellectual interests ranged comprehensively over many subfields of political science.
No one obituary could possibly do justice to Nelson Polsby's personality and writings, but fortunately, that is not required. In addition to many excellent profiles in the print media, his The Forum co-editor and former graduate student, Ray La Raja, has assembled a wonderful collection of tribute essays for Nelson in The Forum (volume 5, issue 1). I will only try to tie some of the pieces together, a task that Nelson often assigned himself when his friends died.
Nelson was interested in the big picture: “I swing for the fences,” he used to say to me, “I don't do bunts or singles.” So what was the final tally for Nelson, this scholar who swung for the fences?
Nelson did indeed hit a lot of homers: a dissertation on community power that became an instant classic, an article on the institutionalization of Congress that is one of the top 20 most-cited articles in the American Political Science Review, a widely adopted book on presidential elections that went into multiple editions over several presidential cycles, a capstone book late in his career that related social and technological transformation to congressional change, and so forth.
Nelson himself was too much the empiricist to claim to have a unifying vision of politics. Still, there was a pluralist coherence to his views, applying the ideas he acquired in graduate school to many diverse aspects of American politics. Appreciating this resolves some of the seeming intellectual contradictions I alluded to earlier.
Two aspects of pluralism in particular reappear in much of Nelson's writing: First, that democracy was about competition and cooperation between different types of elites, not simple and unattainable egalitarianism, and second, that social structure and change helped to explain the evolution and development of political institutions, especially Congress.
In Community Power and Political Theory, Nelson observed that simple stratification theory did not fit the facts of the American experience very well. U.S. democracy has many different elites, some of them competing with one another and others working in fluid coalitions that varied across policy areas. The bases of elitism also vary and include talent, expertise, time, and experience as well as wealth. Since resource inequalities broadly defined are impossible to eliminate, political institutions must accommodate them, not function as if they did not exist. Democratic political structures should not favor any one inequality, but should let all contend freely in the various political arenas of a decentralized government.
Nelson's early pluralist roots are evident in a lifetime of his scholarship and opinions, especially his suspicion of supposedly egalitarian reforms. Party reforms intended to open up the process reduced the role of elected officials and insiders in favor of grassroots activists, thereby weakening the Democrats and leading to their political defeats in the sixties and seventies. The activists' ideological bent needed to be countered in a pluralist mix by the voices of elected officials who understood what it took to win (The Consequences of Party Reform). Party reform did not and could not eliminate inequalities in influence and power. It just shifted them, elevating the press corps into an even more critical role in the selection of presidential party nominees (Media and Momentum: The New Hampshire Primary and Nomination Politics).
Campaign finance reform, which intended to reduce the influence of group and individual donors, favored those with unequal amounts of time and education. Term limits, perhaps the worst of all reforms to Nelson's mind, undermined legislative experience and the natural processes of institutional development for the sake of political amateurism. Too often, reforms aiming for equality simply favored some groups over others, and removed valuable information, expertise, and experience from the system. Nelson preferred a thick Madisonian broth full of varied perspectives and interests.
Another pluralist theme in Nelson's scholarship is the connection between social and political structures. Byron Shafer explores this angle in some depth in his tribute to Nelson in The Forum. Pluralist social conditions (i.e., a multiplicity of elites and interests) thrive in political systems with multiple arenas and decentralized decision—making. Congress, especially in its strong committee and pre-Newt phase, was a paradigmatic pluralist institution. Nelson loved Congress, and believed that it played a critical role in American democracy.
In one of his most important essays, “Legislatures,” Nelson argued that the American Congress was organized in ways that made it “transformative,” meaning that it was capable of making and amending legislation to a degree that most legislatures in the world were not. His seminal article, “The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives,” traces the evolution of that institution into a progressively more complex and differentiated structure that allowed 435 individuals to pool their knowledge and expertise in ways that could transform diverse preferences and interests into policy. At the same time, that structure also reflected the political coalitions and norms of the immediate post-war period. Thus, when “air conditioning,” among other things, transformed the South and shifted the coalitions of American political parties, it changed the organization of Congress in ways that reflected the cleaner ideological lines and higher polarization of contemporary America. As Eric Schickler writes in his reflection on How Congress Evolves, Nelson's final book was a “story of the partial de-institutionalization of the U.S. House” due to “the decline of the seniority system and the reduced role of committees in shaping legislation.”
It would be unfair to him to say that Nelson's pluralist roots explained all. Nelson was interested in the history of ideas and biography. Some of this made its way into his scholarship (e.g., Political Innovation in America: The Politics of Policy Initiation, or What If: Explorations in Social Science Fiction), but most of it was conveyed to friends and students in conversation at tea time or dinner. He was a keen observer of elections and a serious student of voter behavior. He mastered British politics in a year, and wrote about it with Geoffrey Smith, a distinguished British journalist (British Government and Its Discontents [1981]).
Apart from his own scholarship, Nelson was instrumental in shaping and supporting the research of others. As director of the Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS), Nelson sponsored numerous seminars on topics in American and British government. He established an Overseas Americanist program, providing numerous European and Asian scholars with the opportunity to research American politics at the University of California at Berkeley. His door was always open to graduate students, and they congregated at his table to “pull up a toadstool,” listen to him, and just “hang out.” Tea time at the IGS was a chance for colleagues and other students to talk to and learn from Nelson.
Nelson served on innumerable prize and program committee for many organizations, including, of course, the American Political Science Association. He was president of the Yale University Council from 1986–1993, and chair of the Presidential Search Committee for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999–2000. He was greatly respected by the press corps and often quoted in the press. More than that, he was a public intellectual, who engaged regularly in serious intellectual discourse beyond the academy.
His health may have slowed him down physically in the final years, but never slowed his mind. Because he had survived previous health crises, his death caught us by surprise and left us greatly saddened.
