Roy Pierce

Roy Pierce died in Ann Arbor, Michigan on October 24, 2003 at the age of 80. With his passing the profession lost one of its outstanding scholars in the field of French politics and one of its most creative practitioners of genuinely comparative research. As Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Michigan, he continued to be a productive scholar and teacher to his last weeks. He regularly attended research seminars and lectures, commented on colleagues' work, and was at his office daily working on his own research, book reviews, and graduate theses, into summer, 2003. He met with one of his doctoral students 12 days before his death to make sure that she had access to the data she needed for her dissertation. His article, “Modeling Electoral Second Choices: Thwarted Voters in the United States, France and Russia,” published in Electoral Studies in June 2003, continued his research into the voting behavior of citizens when they faced second-best choices. He was at work on a study of LePen's unexpected strength in the first ballot of the French presidential election of 2002.

Pierce was born in New York City, attended public schools there, and graduated in 1940 from DeWitt Clinton High School, where he began to study the French language. His eventual mastery of that language was remarkable, enabling him to feel at home in two cultures. Though he was offered scholarships to Columbia and New York University, the spirit of adventure took him to Deep Springs Junior College in the California desert, attracted by its workstudy program and its spirit of social idealism. There he developed a great love for the open spaces of the American West, which eventually extended to a fascination for the Antipodes. He enjoyed hiking through his beloved Tetons in Wyoming, and in later years went on hiking trips to Alaska, the Arctic, the Russian Far East, and Antarctica.

Pierce began his study of comparative politics in the spring of 1946 as an upperclassman at Cornell University, a war veteran fresh from three years in the United States Air Force in the China-Burma-India Theater. In 1947, he married Winnifred Poland, a graduate student in history at Cornell, who has had a life-long interest in colonial history and genealogy. Just last year he co-authored an article with her deciphering “The Multiple Dimensions of the More Story,” the tale of the immigration of a passenger on the Mayflower from whom Mrs. Pierce is descended.

From the start, Pierce was a goaloriented student. Little more than four years after entering Cornell as a junior, he received a Ph.D. degree there with a dissertation on “The Rassemblement du Peuple Français,” the political movement that hoped to bring De Gaulle back to power in France. In the interval, he had spent a year doing fieldwork in France. He was convinced, even as a young graduate student, that a serious dissertation on French politics required a year's residence in France, and was forever after committed to the proposition that the study of politics must be rooted in the study of the broader civilization within which politics operates. His work reflected that depth of knowledge of context, and he imparted that standard to his graduate students.

Pierce began his teaching career at Smith College and was on the faculty of the department of political science at the University of Michigan since 1956. He also taught as a visitor at Columbia University (1959), Stanford University (1966), the University of Oslo, Norway (1976), and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (1978), and as a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Nice, France (1960).

Pierce's interest in comparative politics was shaped by the Second World War. His Air Force service in India and China, when he was barely 20 years old, was a formative exposure to the unfamiliar world beyond the boundaries of the United States. The collapse of European democracy and the challenge of recreating it aroused his intellectual curiosity in graduate school and guided his life-long interests. And the intellectual migration of European social scientists to the United States, which the war produced, influenced his education directly. This cadre of émigré scholars reinvigorated the European intellectual roots of American political science. Several shaped Pierce's early work: Carl Friedrich (who had come earlier), Ferdinand Hermens, Paul Lazarsfeld, Karl Loewenstein, Franz Neumann, Sigmund Neumann, and, above all, Mario Einaudi, who was Pierce's dissertation supervisor.

Pierce's scholarship reflected these intellectual origins. His research publication record includes over 30 articles, three major books, a textbook, two important translations, and chapters in 10 other volumes. His work focused on European political systems, on European theorists, and on the predicaments of liberal, representative democracy, with the French political experience at the center. But over the course of a productive lifetime, he published work that went far beyond its intellectual origins. Grounded solidly in European political theory, in direct observation of European political phenomena, and in the comparative approach that interprets phenomena in one country by comparing them with their counterparts elsewhere, his work increasingly incorporated new methodologies, using that term in its broadest sense.

At the beginning of Pierce's career, the substantive tasks facing students of comparative politics were formidable. The political world had been remade by the Second World War and basic information was lacking in our journals and our textbooks about constitutions, political parties, structures of government, electoral systems, and interest groups outside the United States. As an undergraduate, Pierce had to use a text hastily assembled after the end of the war by the faculty of the military academy at West Point. Published work on contemporary European politics, let alone politics in Africa and Asia, was sparse. There was a great deal of basic work to be done.

Pierce's first publication was the translation and editing of a manuscript on the French Fourth Republic by a remarkable young French political scientist, François Goguel. It was a major undertaking for which Pierce received scant acknowledgement (1952). Bringing authoritative French views to the attention of the English-speaking world was always a part of his endeavor, his desire to interpret French politics authentically to his colleagues in this country. Pierce's own early research dealt with various aspects of French politics: the constitutional debate in postwar France, elections, the impact of DeGaulle on the French party system, the movement to supranational European cooperation, and contemporary French political thought. The capacity to choose important subjects, to treat them lucidly, and to follow scholarly procedures resting on “tacit assumptions and silent premises” (Eckstein 1963, 30) was evident from the beginning in Pierce's work.

But Pierce's kind of work was not altogether fashionable. It began in a decade of methodological controversies stimulated by the Comparative Politics Committee of the Social Science Research Council. The controversies were marked by the writings of Roy Macridis, who disparaged what he called “the traditional approach” to the study of comparative politics which he found to be “essentially noncomparative … descriptive … parochial … [and] static” (1955, 7–11). He proposed an ambitious agenda designed to broaden the field to include non-European political systems, to abandon “the traditional emphasis upon governmental institutions in order to study politics as a social function” and to aspire to “an exhaustive compilation of data in common categories and the formulation of hypotheses that can be tested” (1955, 22). It was this agenda that led to the structural-functional approach to comparative politics, exemplified at the level of scholarship in a series of nine edited volumes published under the auspices of the SSRC by Princeton University Press. Surveying the controversies, Harry Eckstein worried that they were “distracting its practitioners from substantive tasks” (1963).

Pierce was not distracted by these controversies. By the end of the 1950s, his interests took a turn to French intellectual history, a turn that seems remarkable by the standards of specialization that exist in our profession today. However, the study of comparative politics and political theory in this sense were closely connected in the European tradition. Pierce's interest in Contemporary French Political Thought (1966)—the title of his first book—reflected his conviction that the French political system was only a contemporary manifestation of values and choices that grew out of a long intellectual history. He regarded political theory and empirical analysis as necessarily connected, not in the way that some scholars today consider deductive theory to be a necessary precursor to empirical study. Rather, he believed that empirical findings and political theory must inform each other. Pierce saw in traditional political philosophy the resources for understanding the essentials of political systems, their coherence, and their development. He had a recurring interest in the writings of Raymond Aron. In 1990, under the title Democracy and Totalitarianism (1990), he retranslated and reintroduced a set of 19 lectures given by Aron at the Sorbonne in the academic year 1957–1958. Pierce observed that three decades after Aron had given these lectures, “his analysis makes it possible to understand, better than any other analytical scheme I know, the logic of the dramatic political transformations that have been taking place in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe since the late 1980s” (1990, xviii). Pierce related Aron's ideas to the theoretical endeavors of the structuralfunctionalists in comparative politics in the United States led by Gabriel A. Almond. He suggested that the weakness of Almond's structural-functional categories was their inability to discriminate between totalitarian and non-totalitarian regimes, while the weakness of Aron's categorization of party systems was that it could not by itself discriminate among constitutional-pluralist regimes. His versatility in moving between political philosophy and the study of political institutions was rare even in his own generation. While he did not construct broad analytical frameworks to guide research, he had the sophistication to draw on traditional political philosophy and contemporary political thought to focus his interest in the empirical study of political institutions.

In the mid 1960s, Pierce became a major participant in the approach to comparative politics that was taken at the University of Michigan by political scientists who refused to accept the proposition that the methodologies successful in studying American politics were unsuitable for studying politics outside the United States. That refusal to draw geographic boundaries around research methods reduced the barriers between the subfields of American and comparative politics. The department at Michigan was splendidly situated for this purpose in the 1960s, having become the center for the study of American voting behavior and a magnet attracting European scholars eager to acquire the methodologies that had made this study so successful. In this atmosphere extraordinarily fruitful collaborations developed, some between scholars of different nations and some between scholars with complementary specialties. The collaboration between Pierce and Philip E. Converse was of the latter kind.

Converse and Pierce designed a study of political representation to take place during the French national election of 1967, consisting of interviews with a sample of Deputies in the National Assembly and also a sample of voters in their districts. They planned to compare the roll-call votes of these Deputies in the subsequent Assembly with actual opinion in their districts. But in late spring of 1968 the French people went to the barricades in Europe's largest popular uprising of the century. President de Gaulle dissolved the Assembly before it had served a full year and called for new elections. At first Pierce and Converse were crushed, but they soon realized that events now allowed them to add a before-and-after study of the uprising. They raced back to reinterview their original sample of Deputies and voters in the summer of 1968, adding a smaller follow-up in 1970. In the end, they had three times as much data as they had originally collected, and it took 20 years to complete the project. The result, Political Representation in France, a 1,000-page book published by Harvard University Press in 1986, won the Woodrow Wilson Award for the best book published in political science that year.

There were differences in what each author brought to the collaboration. Pierce was an expert in French politics, read Le Monde every day, and was intimately familiar with the French political scene. Converse was an authority on survey research and statistical inference, co-author of the path-breaking study The American Voter (1960). But Converse recalls that in the course of their collaboration, Pierce picked up the complex canon of do's and don'ts in survey research with lightning speed, and later in Paris he administered their French field work in high style. He was a voracious forager into new techniques. Contrary to most scholars as they move through their careers, Pierce had a superb feel for how new techniques should and should not be used, or how to adjust them to his needs intelligently. Converse regarded it as a virtuoso performance. The collaboration was free of controversies, making perfect use of the complementary talents of the co-authors.

Political Representation in France is a many-sided book. It is a book about French political parties and about how voters perceive these parties, about French elections when they are conducted under a plurality system with two ballots, about the events of 1968 that constituted a major crisis in the French political system, and, finally, and most importantly, about the relationship between constituency opinion and behavior in parliament. It is built on an unprecedentedly complex data set consisting of a three-wave panel survey of opinion in a sample of parliamentary constituencies and, for the first two waves, matching interviews with their candidates for the National Assembly. It lays out the analysis of these data with an attention to detail and with a clarity that serves as a model of analytical candor. One reviewer described it as “conversations with the empirical evidence” and as “a prototypical exemplar of grounded theory, in which theory speaks to the data and the data speak to theory” (Eulau 1987, 210). The book is an extraordinary example of sustained work, having occupied its authors for a generation. In a discipline where research is often done in short time periods and is reported in journal articles, it reminds us of the value of coherence and comprehensiveness that can be achieved only in books of long gestation. While it is a study of a single political system, it interprets its most important findings in comparative perspective, making unusually sophisticated efforts to establish equivalence between the structure of French and American elections.

That comparative perspective was evident again in Pierce's last book, Choosing the Chief: Presidential Elections in France and the United States (1995).

His skill at discerning “functional equivalence” between different institutions, issues, and events, the result of a lifetime of professional practice, is evident throughout the book and illuminates the two most highly developed presidential systems in the western world. In the 10 years after his retirement in 1993, Pierce published not only this book, but major contributions to books on European Community decision making (1994), on political representation (1999), and on the influence of political leaders on election outcomes (2002), as well as the article on “thwarted voters” in the U.S., France, and Russia (2003).

The gradual convergence between American and comparative politics in the profession was advanced by Pierce's work and is illustrated by his career. As a young scholar, Pierce's first order of business was to gain a profound knowledge of the language and culture of the French society whose politics was the subject of his doctoral dissertation. He knew the value of trained observation and description. Since his subject was the relatively unfamiliar politics of France, that was a particularly important aspect of his enterprise. Furthermore, Pierce became convinced of the connection between theory and empirical research, regarding theory in its broadest sense as political philosophy, contemporary political thought, as well as epistemology. He found in theory a source of research questions, methods for answering them, and a guide to the interpretation of research observations. He never let methodological considerations in the sense of research techniques guide his substantive interests, but in the course of his career he became a sensitive methodologist. Finally, he was unusually imaginative in dealing with problems of crossnational equivalence, recognizing that identity in the names of things does not assure the equivalence of the concepts they connote. That is undoubtedly the most challenging aspect of engaging in multiple levels of analysis without which comparative research is impossible.

Pierce was a quintessential scholar, undistracted by the non-scholarly temptations of the academy. His work exemplifies tough standards for sound comparative research: politics must be understood in the context of the civilization that produced it, research must proceed from deep observation and description, the interpretation of empirical data requires knowledge of theory broadly conceived, and conceptual equivalence cannot be taken for granted when systems themselves are variables. The broad range of scholarly skills that Pierce developed was always rare and is ever less likely to be found in single scholars in the future. Major comparative research increasingly requires broader collaboration and a more complicated research infrastructure than existed when Pierce entered the profession. That is why Pierce's accomplishments deserve such special attention. For it was his own remarkable versatility and his own persistent dedication to the craft of comparative research that made it possible for him to make an absolutely distinctive contribution to the reintegration of comparative politics within political science. He made that contribution in the most admirable and most durable manner, not by prescription but by singular example.