A life of distinguished scholarship and teaching ended in Tucson, Arizona, on April 10, 2008, with the death of John C. Wahlke, who served successively on the political science faculties of Amherst College, Vanderbilt University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Iowa, Stony Brook University, and the University of Arizona. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, John lived more than five months beyond 90 years of age. His professional career stretched over more than half a century, and his teaching, research, and leadership deeply influenced at least two important subdivisions of political science: legislative and biopolitical research.
He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on October 29, 1917, where he grew up and attended elementary and high school. He graduated from high school in 1935, and then enrolled in Harvard College, where he earned an AB degree magna cum laude, with election to Phi Beta Kappa, in 1939. He briefly worked at jobs for Seagram and Sons and the Crosley Corporation, and attended the University of Cincinnati, but his obvious promise as a student was interrupted by the vicissitudes of World War II. John entered the U.S. Army as a private in 1942, and left as a captain. He received training as an air observation pilot flying small airplanes and spotting enemy targets for the field artillery. While he was attending flight school in Kansas he met Virginia Joan Higgins of Pittsburg, Kansas, and they were married in December 1943. They had two children, Janet (Parmely) and Dale.
John served for two years in the European Theater, among other assignments, flying over the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge in the winter months of 1944–45. He won five battle stars, and was awarded the Air Medal with two Oak Leaf Clusters. For John, these were exciting and rewarding times; he thought of his European military service as a high point of his life. He loved to tell the story about flying over the American-German lines when his plane's engine failed and he had to land in the midst of a hotly contested battle zone. He was able to hide his small airplane in a nearby barn and, after dark, join a small convoy of Americans searching for friendly forces. Suddenly a German tank lumbered out of the woods and, unaware that the convoy was American, not German, the tank proceeded to fall into line. John was close enough to hear the Germans talking. Luckily, after a short time the tank headed off in a completely different direction, and the Americans, including John, were greatly relieved.
John Wahlke became a distinguished teacher and research scholar. His undergraduate teaching interests were varied and longstanding. While still at Harvard, he served on the board of freshman advisers; for a number of years he was an examiner for honors studies at the University of Rochester; and he worked tirelessly as part of the “syllabus project” of the APSA. But his teaching career really began with his first academic affiliation—a four-year stint teaching undergraduates at Amherst College. In 1961–62 he worked with undergraduates in the Vanderbilt-in-France program at Nice and Aix-en-Provence. Active in programs for undergraduates undertaken by the APSA, in the mid-1970s, he chaired an association committee on educational policy and programs. Then from 1988–90 he chaired an APSA task force on the political science major that worked in collaboration with the American Association of Colleges and Universities. This influential educational policy committee made a number of recommendations for greater structure in the political science major (see Wahlke's March 1991 report, “Liberal Learning and the Political Science Major: A Report to the Profession” in PS: Political Science and Politics).
But Wahlke's deep interest in teaching political science went much further than advising students and serving on committees. He was also committed to teaching through developing and writing the textbooks used in courses of instruction. For the general introductory political science course for undergraduates, he first wrote Government and Politics: An Introduction to Political Science (1971; with Alex N. Dragnich and others). A quarter-century later, he wrote another general textbook entitled Introduction to Political Science: Reason, Reflection, and Analysis (1996; with R. Kenneth Godwin). For students of American politics, he edited a collection of readings, The American Political System: Notes and Readings (1967; revised in 1971; with Bernard E. Brown).
Of course John Wahlke came to be regarded as a very important, distinguished research scholar. His life as a researcher came in three successive contributions. His initial efforts concerned political philosophy and public policy, and reflected his efforts to find a place for himself in the scholarly world. His Harvard Ph.D. dissertation dealt with “Charles Fourier and Henri Saint-Simon as Theorists of the Reaction” (1952). And then, fresh out of graduate school in the early 1950s, he edited two books—The Causes of the American Revolution (1950; 1962; 1973; 2007), and Loyalty in a Democratic State (1952). In the 1960s and 1970s, his research and writing focused mainly on legislative behavior. Along with Heinz Eulau (and also William Buchanan and LeRoy C. Ferguson), he fielded a large-scale study grounded in personal interviews with state legislators in California, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Ohio. The book that emerged from this project—The Legislative System: Explorations in Legislative Behavior (1962)—remains the monumental study of legislative behavior in the United States. The novelty of the book's methodology attracted voluminous replication by other scholars, establishing the precedent of acquiring knowledge about legislative behavior largely derived from extensive personal interviews with legislators themselves. A number of precursor articles in the political science research journals, including “The Role of the Representative: Some Empirical Observations on the Theory of Edmund Burke” in American Political Science Review (September 1959), coauthored with Heinz Eulau, William Buchanan, and LeRoy C. Ferguson, helped to enlarge the profound influence of this project.
Moreover, Wahlke expanded the purview of legislative behavior research in a seminal article published in the British Journal of Political Science, “Policy Demands and System Support: The Role of the Represented” (July 1971). Here he focused on how “representative bodies contribute to the generation and maintenance of support” for governing institutions and for the wider political system. As was his inclination, he called for a new agenda of political science research that would move away from exclusive attention to the so-called “demand-input model,” and work on the formation, mobilization, content, and consequences of support for the political system.
In the late 1960s, Wahlke's scholarly interests turned from legislative behavior to wider scientific concerns with the biological bases of political life. In 1972, John moved to Stony Brook University with the promise and hope of building a graduate program in bio-politics. As graduate director, he structured a program based upon rigorous methodological training and a focus on laboratory experimentation. His contribution is extant today in Stony Brook's focus on political psychology and the extensive suite of laboratories that he was instrumental in funding and building. Unfortunately the New York state budget collapsed, and all new graduate programs were frozen for five years. Wahlke headed west, back to Iowa City.
Wahlke's 1978 APSA presidential address, “Prebehavioralism in Political Science” (American Political Science Review March 1979), captured his enthusiasm for and commitment to the “science” of political science. He argued strenuously that “political scientists must recognize and apply the basic knowledge about human behavior provided by the biobehavioral sciences,” including ethology, psychophysiology, and psychophysics.
Wahlke's active involvement in teaching and his very substantial research contributions led to important assignments in the research world. In the 1960s, he was chosen president of the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research, served as a member of the Political Science Advisory Panel of the National Science Foundation, and was a member of the Committee on Governmental and Legal Affairs of the Social Science Research Council. In the 1970s, he was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, chairman of the Educational Testing Services's committee on the advanced political science test, and president of the Midwest Political Science Association. Over the years, he was a member of the editorial boards of six political science research journals, including the American Journal of Political Science and the American Political Science Review. He was elected president of the American Political Science Association for 1977–78.
Moreover, John possessed many qualities that inclined his colleagues to choose him to be their leader. Accordingly, he served as department chair at three institutions—the State University of New York at Buffalo (1965–66), the University of Iowa (1969–70), and the University of Arizona (1979–83). In each case, he sought to develop and elevate the department's national and international standing, and to assure the systematic teaching of political science at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Additionally, John provided leadership to association committees and the political science associations themselves.
John Wahlke was an extraordinary scholar whose relentless and inquiring mind led to major disciplinary research and teaching contributions. He was deeply committed to the highest quality of theory, research, and instruction. He was a generous, interesting, stimulating, and endearing colleague. One University of Iowa colleague remembered John as “an extraordinarily generous senior colleague, a superb host for events departmental and otherwise, and an excellent tennis player.” Another recalled that John “was certainly an extraordinary person, always stimulating, often very original.” He will be missed.
