John Bohte
John Bohte, associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee (UWM), died unexpectedly on Wednesday, March 1, 2017. John was an undergraduate at UWM, graduating with a degree in political science in 1992. He went on to earn a PhD from Texas A&M University in 1997. After four years on the faculty at Oakland University (Detroit, Michigan), John returned to UWM in 2004 to join the political science department. During his years on the faculty, John served the department as director of graduate studies, and he was a founding member of the faculty of the public and nonprofit administration program. He taught regularly in the masters of public administration program, served as the internship coordinator, and was the director of the program for many years.
Beyond his work in these departmental roles, John was an active scholar in the areas of public administration and public policy. He was coauthor of two books, Politics and the Bureaucracy: Policymaking in the Fourth Branch of Government and Applied Statistics for Public and Nonprofit Administration, and many articles in top peer-reviewed journals, among them Journal of Conflict Resolution, Public Administration Review, Policy Studies Journal, and Journal of Politics. John was also a popular teacher among graduate and undergraduate students, teaching a range of courses from large introductory classes to small graduate seminars. His contributions to the curriculum of the political science department and the masters of public administration program were invaluable.
John was a quiet soul, kind-hearted, and willing to help anyone at any time. He was always the first one to arrive to a party, usually bearing chocolate. John will be deeply missed by the many people who loved him.
—Kathleen Dolan, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
J. Woodford Howard, Jr.
J. Woodford Howard, Jr., the Thomas P. Stran Professor Emeritus at the Johns Hopkins University—known as “Woody” by his colleagues and former students—passed away on May 19, 2017, after a long illness. Highly regarded in the field of public law, Woody was an inspiring scholar and teacher, wonderful adviser, passionate patron of the arts, and loving husband and father.
Born July 5, 1931, Woody grew up in Prestonsburg, eastern Kentucky, the son of a lawyer. He graduated summa cum laude from Duke University in 1952 and began graduate school at Princeton University, taking two masters degrees in 1954 and 1955 before serving with the US Air Force in Morocco. He returned to Princeton to complete a PhD in political science in 1959, under Alpheus T. Mason, and would later recount that he sequestered himself in the graduate facilities for 11 months, stepping off campus only once while finishing his dissertation. He spent several years teaching at Lafayette College and Duke before arriving at Johns Hopkins University in 1967 as an associate professor. He became a full professor in 1969 and chaired the department in the early 1970s. Earning the endowed chair in 1975, he served there until taking emeritus status in 1996.
Woody’s expertise and passion were in US constitutional law, the Supreme Court, and the judicial process—the traditional core of the public law subfield—and in his teaching and work he was committed to a broad and pluralistic future for the field. His first book, Mr. Justice Murphy: A Political Biography (1968), is commonly considered among the finest judicial biographies. In a 1971 article in the American Political Science Review, he sought to defend a place for biography “related to, if not part of, the scientific enterprise”: valuing aggregate analysis but using the case studies of judges to “reclaim human beings from abstraction, a function the more to be prized the greater is our success in aggregation” (Howard 1971, 715). His second book was highly influential in turning the subfield’s preoccupation with the Supreme Court, while Woody himself developed new methodological skills. For Courts of Appeals in the Federal Judicial System (1981), Woody tracked the work of three circuits over two decades and, combined with 35 interviews with circuit judges, advanced a conception of the judicial role that explains how political attitudes affect behavior when judges do not have the independence of the high court. In his later career, Woody returned to biography but extended his work to trial courts, with the project of the authorized biography of Harold R. Medina, the most famous trial judge in America during the early Cold War era. (The biography will be published posthumously.)
Through his life and work, Woody fought against the over-simplification that threatened to reduce all judicial behavior to mere political attitudes, and that divided the discipline as a battle of quantitative versus qualitative approaches. Far from being a methodological warrior, he sought to identify what the “quantifiers” and “qualifiers” shared in common. As he emphasized in an influential APSR article, “On the Fluidity of Judicial Choice” (1968), what he saw in close study of the Court pointed to “the essential unity of research techniques,” where the “the critical need is for attempts to combine the findings of aggregate analysis and microanalysis in a theoretical synthesis.” The field responded, working to account for institutions and strategic behavior well before similar turns were made in other subfields. In a chapter reflecting on Woody’s contributions to the study of judicial behavior, Nancy Maveety and John Maltese concluded that his work had been “both a substantive foundation for subsequent research questions and a catalyst for the ongoing dialogue about research design.” In 2008, Woody was recognized by the Law and Courts section of APSA with the Lifetime Achievement Award.
An outstanding, dedicated teacher, Woody sought to impart the history and richness of his subjects with his students. He was exceptionally generous with his time, taking many hours to prepare for each class, and then sitting with students in appointments that could last for hours. He was as passionate as anyone about the Supreme Court and recent developments in constitutional law, but urged students to never overlook the significance of lower courts and the nonconstitutional domains of public law, especially administrative law. Recalling his father’s practice in a rural county, he declined to allow political scientists to become too confident in their methods, holding everyone to the test, “so what do we political scientists know now that a good courthouse attorney didn’t know all along?” To raise expectations even further, to Woody, great scholarship required great writing. Many of his students recall his blue pencil markings all over their work, detailed line edits that elevated their writing. Multiple winners of the Corwin Award, given to the best dissertation in public law, are testament to his success as a mentor. As Cornelius Kerwin, until recently the president of American University said, “I came to Hopkins as a student, and after he worked me over, I left as a scholar.” All the same, he urged students to find balance in their lives, particularly encouraging them to catch concerts or walk through the Baltimore Museum of Art on the edge of campus.
Beyond life as a scholar and teacher, Woody was a gentleman of grace and gentle wit. He was a noted patron of the arts. For decades, he frequented museums, concerts, and the opera, and he accelerated the pace of travel in his retirement. Students, frequently welcomed to his house for dinner, knew his taste for abstract expressionism, and were offered a tour of his collection, which included work by Jasper Johns, Grace Hartigan, and de Kooning. He sat on the multiple boards for the arts, particularly the Baltimore Museum of Art. His constant companion in these pursuits was Valerie (known as Jane), his wife of 57 years, and Woody was equally a devoted father to his daughter Elaine. Woody is survived by Jane and Elaine, along with two grandsons. A memorial service was held in June 2017 in Baltimore.
—Patrick Schmidt, Macalester College
Peter Augustine Lawler
Self-proclaimed postmodern conservative Peter Augustine Lawler, for 38 years a professor in the department of government and international relations at Berry College, in Rome, Georgia, and author or editor of more than 15 books on political philosophy, popular culture, and the contemporary human condition, passed away unexpectedly in May 2017.
As a scholar, Lawler was best known for arguing that, even as we embrace the freedoms of modern liberal democracy, we must not sever ourselves from our identities as fundamentally moral beings, a claim he connected explicitly to his own identity as a Christian. Lawler was so well regarded for his provocative commentaries on contemporary American life in both his scholarship and in the blogosphere that his death has also been mourned widely outside academia, with moving tributes appearing in The Weekly Standard, the Federalist, and the National Review Online. Lawler served on the President’s Council on Bioethics during the George W. Bush administration, and just before his death he had been tapped as editor for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s conservative journal Modern Age.
The many pieces written about Lawler’s contributions to conservative thought have already done a wonderful job of highlighting key ideas that connected writing he did on bioethics to his reflections on film, Walker Percy, Tocqueville, modern celebrity, and the angst of our age. Yet they do not capture all that Lawler has left to us.
I first encountered Lawler in an American government class in the fall of 1984. I couldn’t have labeled myself then, but at 18, I was already not going to become a conservative thinker. Rather I was an instinctive feminist, a fierce defender of an assertive social state, passionate about equality and justice even on causes relatively new in those days such as LGBTQ rights, and deeply distrustful of established authority. When the “Great Books” debates of the late 1980s were flamed into a national controversy by Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, I was already tired of greatness, of the world planned in advance by and for people who were not like me or lots of others. At the end of a Shakespeare seminar I declared to my teacher that the playwright was a sexist and that maybe that was reason enough to boot him permanently from the canon.
My Shakespeare teacher was appalled, but Lawler met me where I stood, even when I couldn’t yet say where that was. Over the years I studied at Berry, we wrestled over Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s critique of the pursuit of happiness in American life, Rousseau’s noble savage, divorce, abortion, and countless other topics. From the beginning I knew that on many things we did not agree.
Usually, I could not budge Lawler very far from the view he was espousing. He was too talented to be taken down by what he good-naturedly called a “merely mortal undergraduate.” He was adept at pushing my claims out to their most extreme and ridiculous possibilities and then kind of giggling a bit conspiratorially, as if to let me know he understood I could never be intending something so crazy.
Yet, sometimes he paused in an argument to congratulate me honestly for a noble defense of a position with which he couldn’t quite agree but that he was willing to admit was reasonably held. “That,” he would say, “was spirited in exactly the right way.” Utterly unorthodox conclusions drawn from ancient readings were met with a long pause and comments such as “a bit pointy-headed but generally right.” Intellectual laziness on a paper that otherwise met the assignment requirements once earned me an unforgettable grade of “A--/D++.” Lawler was fierce. And kind.
These are, of course, my personal memories of a beloved teacher, but especially in our discipline, we worry a lot recently about what kind of a presence we are supposed to be in the classroom. I have friends on the Left who are desperate to liberate their students’ intellects from the multitude of biases they are thought to hold toward people of other classes, races, or gender orientations. I have friends on the Right who want to liberate their students’ intellects from the excessive sensitivities they are thought to have absorbed from “politically correct” upbringings and classrooms. I have disciplinary colleagues who are convinced that they must remain “value neutral” in the classroom even while they fret also about how to impart some sort of ethical wherewithal to young people who face very dangerous times.
These divisions among us as teachers—the various critical theory, old-fashioned rigor, or polite neutrality approaches to our students—are intriguingly like the angry divisions in the American electorate today, or, for that matter, in the electorates of many wealthy liberal democracies. Moreover, these different teaching commitments have something troubling in common. In all these approaches, the teacher is placed far above the student, seeing truth better than the student ever could. The student’s thoughts are only “practice” thoughts because the teacher already knows what there is to know, and the student is not really invited in to remake the world.
Lawler’s approach, however, was different. Perhaps he owed it to his self-avowedly Christian conviction about the equal value and irreplaceable distinction of each and every human being. Perhaps, it was his complete unwillingness to draw lines of exclusion between the Mad Men television series, Plato, and Thomas Aquinas as he sought to understand and write about the lonely suffering in so many human hearts. Perhaps it was because he was a sort of natural nonconformist (never really getting even the practice of tucking his shirt all the way in). Or because he actually believed (as a complete heretic in political science and much of political philosophy) that love is what it is all about.
At any rate, he honored his students neither by hiding his moral vision nor by seeking converts. Instead, Lawler put his convictions on the seminar table and then engaged his young thinkers’ critiques of those views not “as if” they mattered but because they mattered. I remember that once he asked me if it is possible to be right when you are a minority of one. The question—an essential question for any ethical democratic citizen—stopped me cold. But I remember thinking that Lawler wasn’t asking it as a kind of snide provocation. Rather, I thought, he was asking the same question of himself, in a moment of real disagreement between the two of us.
Conservative tributes have not highlighted Lawler’s persistent restating in his writing of the importance of contemporary commitments to women’s equality, civil rights, and racial and class equality, or the fact that he thought our country could make room both for community among religious conservatives and same-sex marriage. But as his student, I did not miss his genuine attachment to what I, too, from the other side of the political spectrum, believed to be beautiful in our American project.
I am not the only “Lefty” student to have bounded out of Lawler’s classes honored and empowered by the challenges I found there. Years ago, in a group of alums who had all gone on to graduate school in politics or public policy, we ended up laughing at how good he had been in inspiring and enabling scholars on both ends of the political spectrum. Truth is, reading Lawler’s scholarly writing today, even with my much more developed sense of how far I am at times from conservative schools of thought, I find that I share a great deal with him. I can see how he wanted to help us all know and treasure fragile human beauty. I can see in how he reads his “opponents” on the Left, that he seeks not a way to win over them but what might be winning about them. He might think they are wrong, but he gets that they are trying to do something good. And he appreciates when they are spirited in just the right way.
In an essay that traces his Christian understanding of modern liberty and individuality, Lawler writes, “So as genuinely magnanimous humans, we acknowledge our own being as a gift and our undeniably significant and excellent accomplishments as dependent on a personal, relational context beyond our control and comprehension” (2014, 101).
If Peter Lawler has left our discipline a legacy, an inheritance we are obliged to share with our colleagues, cultivate among our students, and offer to an aching world, it is this idea of genuine human magnanimity, a path to a less angry, more possible political discourse. Even though Lawler’s call to simultaneously honor our mutual distinctiveness and humbly accept our inevitable connectedness emerged from his understanding of Christian grace (or maybe precisely because it did), I think he would agree with me that the path of magnanimity is open to anyone, Right or Left, Christian or not. The time to take it is now.
—Robin M. LeBlanc, Washington and Lee University
Horst Mewes
Horst Mewes, associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado (CU), passed away suddenly and unexpectedly at his home in Longmont, Colorado, May 22, 2017, at the age of 76. His family and friends, colleagues, and students deeply mourn his loss. Horst was one of the longest serving members of the CU department. He was interested in an unusually broad range of topics in political philosophy, among them democratic theory, German political thought, political parties and movements, the theory and practice of citizenship in the United States and European Union, and the political thought of Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss (with both of whom he studied). Horst attended Beloit College as an undergraduate and received his MA and PhD from the University of Chicago in 1970. While at Chicago he was awarded both a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and a German Marshall Fund Dankstipendium. His first teaching job was during this time, at Western Illinois University at Macomb in 1966–1967. From 1967 to 1969, he taught at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. At a party at the local Community Action Agency, he met one of his future colleagues, Bill Safran, who suggested that he apply for an opening at CU, Boulder. Horst got the job and never looked back, remaining an active and beloved member of the political science department for more than 40 years.
Horst grew up in Germany after the Second World War and came to the United States with his parents in 1955, at the age of 14. Growing up in Germany left Horst with an abiding interest in twentieth century German history, a strong sense of the enormous damage that can be done if democracy is destroyed, and a strong commitment to teach students that democracy does not flourish without being actively defended. His involvement in German academic life was extensive. He travelled frequently back and forth between Germany and the United States, held visiting appointments in Tuebingen and Erlangen, lectured at Trier, Oldenburg, and the Free University of Berlin, received grants from the German Government, the Goethe Society, the German-Historical Society, and was a member of the Institute for North American Studies in Munich. He published a book in German, The American Political System: Theory and Practice, as well as more than 20 book chapters and articles on such diverse topics as the German Green Party, American higher education as a model for Germany, and ancient Greek influences on German political thought. Over time, however, Horst’s main interests shifted from Germany to Europe as a whole, and then to the European-US Atlantic Community. In 2010, he received the EU Commission/US Department of Education Atlantis Excellence Grant to fund the exchange of students and faculty among CU, Catolica University in Lisbon, and various German universities. The exchange focused on the study of EU/US citizenship, a topic on which Horst regularly taught in both Boulder and Lisbon. It was typical of Horst that he was excited to get to know another country, Portugal, through this new scholarly enterprise.
As already noted, Horst trained with both Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss and maintained an interest in their political thought throughout his career. One result of this interest was a coedited collection of essays by leading German and American scholars, Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Émigrés and American Political Thought after World War II. This collection explored Arendt’s and Strauss’s distinctive analyses of the American experience as well as their unique contributions to American political philosophy and political science. Another result of his life-long interest in Arendt was a monograph, Hannah Arendt’s Political Humanism, which explored various tensions in Arendt’s conception of politics as a distinctive realm of human action, freedom, self-display, and human greatness. In this work, Horst focused on a theme that fascinated him throughout his intellectual career and that also drew him to theorists such as Benjamin Constant and Alexis DeTocqueville, namely, the problem of achieving a workable synthesis of ancient and modern ideals of citizenship. Although his study of Arendt contains a great many insights, perhaps its most original and striking contribution is Horst’s exploration of the similarities and differences between Arendt’s idea of politics as a realm in which human greatness most clearly appears and the American Framers’ preoccupation with fame as “the ruling passion of the noblest minds.” Horst also explored the political significance of the desire for recognition in the political theory of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, especially Adam Smith.
Smith’s Theory of the Moral Sentiments was the topic of just one of many Liberty Fund conferences that Horst organized during his career. The range of topics discussed at these conferences illustrates well the unusual breadth of Horst’s intellectual interests. Between 2000 and 2014, he organized conferences on subjects as diverse as the thought of Michael Oakeshott, German and Italian post-war constitutions, the idea of freedom in the Federalist papers, the collapse of Soviet Communism in Eastern Europe, liberal democracy and totalitarianism in the twentieth century, individualism in Emerson and Thoreau, constitutionalism in Kant and Hegel, Goethe’s Faust, religion and politics in the Thirty Years War, and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Horst published scholarly articles on many of these topics, as well as on religion and politics in America, the political thought of Karl Marx, and trade union power in capitalist democracies. At the time of his death, he was hard at work on a book about modern democratic theory, tentatively titled “Transformations: The Private and Public Spheres in Liberal Democracy.”
It will be as a cherished teacher and colleague that Horst will be most remembered by those who knew him, however. He served as director of the department’s Honors Program for many years and is fondly remembered by the both undergraduate and graduate students as a friendly and supportive teacher who communicated a passion for his subject. As a colleague, he was always reasonable, thoughtful, and generous. In conversation he often became quite excited about ideas, but his enthusiasm was always leavened by a wry sense of humor. He was a deeply kind man. His wife, Karen Parish, his son, Dirk Mewes, stepson, Matthew Cochran, and his six grandchildren, survive him. He will be greatly missed.
—David R. Mapel, University of Colorado, Boulder
Pietro S. Nivola
Pietro S. Nivola was an outstanding writer and observer of American politics. He made major contributions to the federalism, regulation, political polarization, and energy conservation, among other topics. His books informed several generations of students, practitioners, reporters, and academics. He passed away from cancer on April 5, 2017, at the age of 73.
Nivola was born on March 31, 1944, in New York City. His father Costantino Nivola was a distinguished painter and sculptor who came to America from Italy. His mother Ruth was an artist as well and the two of them conveyed elegance, beauty, and an outstanding design sense to their son. He grew up on the East End of Long Island and attended Harvard College. He earned a PhD in government from Harvard University. In 1976–1977, he served as lecturer in the department of government at Harvard University.
After that stint, he taught political science at the University of Vermont as an assistant and associate professor. He moved to Washington, DC, in 1988 as a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. This would start what became a more than three-decade career at the think tank. He was promoted to senior fellow in 1993 and served as vice president and director of the governance studies program between 2004 and 2008.
All of his colleagues found him to be a warm human being who was eager to help and someone who mentored many interns, research assistants, and colleagues over the years. Brookings Senior Fellow and Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne recalled Nivola’s love of art and architecture, which came out in his 1999 book, Laws of the Landscape: How Policies Shape Cities in Europe and America. The volume would demonstrate the author’s keen understanding of urban design and city landscapes. According to Dionne, “It was a beautiful book and a rigorous piece of work” that showed how Nivola’s “artistic temperament gave him a special calm and engaged detachment that was especially important in tense political moments.”
That book was just one of the 11 books and numerous articles that Nivola would write on a broad range of topics. One of his earliest books was his 1986 volume titled The Politics of Energy Conservation (Brookings Institution Press). It was a farsighted book that explored the importance of conservation long before sustainability became such an important part of the policy landscape.
That same year, Nivola published The Urban Service Problem (Lexington Books/DC Heath). As a sign of its enduring contributions, it would go through three editions as colleagues, students, and practitioners applied it to a range of city service questions.
In 1997 Nivola produced a Brookings conference volume Comparative Disadvantages? Social Regulations and the Global Economy (Brookings Institution Press, 1997). It was followed by Managing Green Mandates: Local Rigors of US Environmental Regulation (with Jon A. Shields) published in 2001 by the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies; Tense Commandments: Federal Prescriptions and City Problems (Brookings Institution Press, 2002); and Agenda for the Nation (Brookings Institution Press, 2003), a volume coedited with Henry J. Aaron and James M. Lindsay.
His books, coedited with David W. Brady of the Hoover Institution, Red and Blue Nation? Volume I: Characteristics and Causes of America’s Polarized Politics (Brookings/Hoover, 2006) and Red and Blue Nation? Volume II: Consequences and Correction of America’s Polarized Politics (Brookings/Hoover, 2008) foreshadowed the intense polarization that would afflict American politics. He conceived these books, edited the numerous essays they compromised, and coauthored two chapters. Writing more than a decade before our current period, these books showed Nivola at his best, identifying a key political problem before it had reached its full scope, discerning its risks to the system as a whole, and seeking practical solutions to those issues. He was determined to do what he could to understand and lean against what he saw as dangerous trends.
One of his last books was What So Proudly We Hailed, a book edited by Nivola and Peter Kastor that appeared in 2012. It reflected on the contemporary meaning of the War of 1812. In it, Nivola returned to his longtime interest in history and shows what happens when a country goes to war during a period of public mistrust, political polarization, and executive branch in-fighting. It explored the war’s legacies and ways that it transformed the politics of its day. The book raised issues that continue to perplex us to this day.
His final book was What Would Madison Do? coedited with Brookings Senior Fellow Benjamin Wittes in 2015. The book assembled a first-rate set of scholars to analyze our nation’s constitutional principles and how they apply to the contemporary situation. It analyzed issues such as gridlock, compromise, Senate rules, state and local government, education, and healthcare. Like every other project with which he was involved, the book showcased the breadth of Nivola’s intellect and his keen insights into national affairs.
In each of these volumes, his sense went against the grain of his times. As news cycles shrank and experts weighed in on hourly developments, Nivola insisted that research should stay focused on large issues that required long-term, evidence-based responses. Such proposals might not garner immediate media attention, and they might not find eager buyers in the political marketplace. No matter, he said; this wasn’t the right way of keeping score, he felt. Our mission was to be ready when the time was right.
In everything he did, Nivola was a craftsman—careful, patient, and precise. He valued concision and searched tirelessly for le mot juste. He reworked each paragraph—indeed, each sentence—until it met his exacting standards. He knew that every piece of writing, long or short, has its own appropriate architecture, and he would not stop until he found it.
These attributes made him a superb editor as well. Editing is a thankless task. Authors often love their words unconditionally—in the case of first drafts, unwisely but too well. Editors must push authors to abandon some of what they love, much as doctors tell overweight patients to eat less. In both cases, the reward for good advice is resistance mixed with resentment.
Nivola’s editing revealed not only his intellect but also his character. He was firm and could be relentless, but he was always gentle and thoughtful. Shortly before he retired in 2013, he worked with his revered mentor, James Q. Wilson, on what turned out to be one of Wilson’s last published works. Wilson was in poor health, and his first draft did not come close to the mark. Over a period of months, with unfailing tact, Pietro steered draft after draft until the ship finally reached port. It was like a son doing for an aging father what the father once did for the son—a perilous role reversal that few of us can carry off.
In his personal life, Nivola was blessed with warm family relationships. He leaves behind his wife Katherine, sons Adrian and Alessandro, step-daughter Asia Webber, and five grandchildren. According to Katherine, he was happiest when in the company of family and friends. He especially enjoyed outings with them on his antique wooden boat. He was an avid tennis player and hosted dinner parties whose conversations lasted well into the evening.
Too many scholars lead unbalanced lives. Nivola made time for everything that mattered—family, friends, a rich social life, intense physical activity, and cooking that merited at least one Michelin star. Because his life was so rounded, he welcomed retirement when he judged that the time had come, and he enjoyed every day, even when he knew his days were dwindling to a precious few. He taught us how to live, and in his final months he taught us how to die.
In lieu of flowers, his family has requested that friends make a contribution to the Brookings Institution toward the Pietro S. Nivola Internship in Governance Studies.
—Darrell M. West, Brookings Institution
—William Galston, Brookings Institution
Laurie A. Rhodebeck
To the great sadness of her colleagues and students, Laurie A. Rhodebeck lost her valiant struggle against cancer on September 13, 2016. Laurie was a native of Ohio. Born in Galion, she and her family moved to Champagne-Urbana, Illinois, when her father took a job with Magnavox. Four years later, the family returned to Galion where Laurie attended high school and was an active member of Junior Achievement and the Spanish Club. She was a member of the National Honor Society and was chosen salutatorian of her graduating class. Laurie than attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she graduated summa cum laude and was inducted into both Phi Beta Kappa and Mortar Board. While at Miami, Laurie won the Gary L. Best Memorial Award in Political Science in recognition of outstanding scholarship, leadership, creativity, and ambition, as well as the Howard White Award in Political Science in recognition of outstanding scholarship and service to the department.
Following graduation from Miami University, Laurie went to New Haven where she received AB, AM, MPhil, and PhD degrees in political science from Yale University. While at Yale, Laurie cultivated a lifelong interest in the psychological bases of political behavior. Her doctoral dissertation, titled The Influence of Group Identification on Political Preferences, was supervised by Don Kinder, David Mayhew, and Stephen Rosenstone, and completed in 1986. In this work she developed a theoretical model for the influence of psychological aspects of group influence on individual behavior, and tested it using data from the American National Election Surveys.
Laurie’s academic appointments were in the political science departments of the University of Notre Dame (instructor, 1981–1985), the State University of New York at Buffalo (assistant professor, 1986–1997), Oberlin College (visiting assistant professor, 1997–1998), and the University of Louisville (associate professor, 1998 until her death). While at Louisville, Laurie served for many years as director of graduate studies in the political science department, and twice served as acting chair. Her major research interests included research methods; quantitative and qualitative approaches to social science; political communication, media effects on public opinion, and policy framing; contextual influences on political attitudes and behavior, gender, and politics; and elections as political games.
Since 1981, Laurie published articles in such leading political science journals as The Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, Public Opinion Quarterly, Micropolitics, and Political Research Quarterly, and she presented more than two dozen papers at professional conferences, mostly at the American Political Science Association, the Midwest Political Science Association, and the Southern Political Science Association.
Laurie’s professional service led her to serve as a reviewer for many journals (including American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Social Science Quarterly, Law and Society, Women and Politics), several major university presses (Cambridge, Oxford, and the University of California), and the National Science Foundation. Her community service included numerous interviews with CNN, NPR, Bloomberg News, AP, Congressional Quarterly, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and Time Magazine.
Greatly appreciated by her students for her prowess as a classroom instructor who was generous with her time to her students outside the classroom, Laurie received a university-wide award for outstanding undergraduate teaching by the State University of New York (Buffalo) Student Association. And for a number of years she was recognized as a “Faculty Favorite” by students at the University of Louisville. Laurie served, as either chair or member, on more than a dozen PhD committees and more than 50 masters committees. And she supervised numerous undergraduate internships and college honors theses.
Laurie’s faculty colleagues also greatly appreciated her generosity in assisting them with both methodological and substantive problems connected with their research and teaching. Her office door was always open to colleagues and students alike.
One day a note appeared on Laurie’s office door at the University of Louisville: “Gone to lunch. Be back soon.” Alas, it was not to be.
A teacher and colleague of great esteem, she is sorely missed by all who had the good fortune to know her as friend. We count ourselves among those lucky ones. We revere her memory as both friend and colleague. And we hold dear the memories of our visits in the last year of her life.
—Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., The University at Buffalo (SUNY)
—D. Munroe Eagles, The University at Buffalo (SUNY)
Giovanni Sartori
Giovanni Sartori, emeritus professor of political science at Columbia University, died in Rome April 3, 2017. He is survived by his daughter Ilaria and his wife Isabella. Born in Florence May 13, 1924, Sartori graduated in Social and Political Sciences at the University of Florence in 1946 and started a long and extremely distinguished academic career teaching, first, theory of the state and, then, political science. In 1966 he became the first full professor ever of political science in Italy and devoted himself to the reconstruction on new foundations of the discipline that had enjoyed a brief life before Fascism. This was done by offering scholarships to a small group of graduate students through the Centro Studi di Politica Comparata that he had founded in Florence and guided for a decade. Most of those students have since successfully become professors of political science in several Italian departments. Though the department of political science of the University of Florence was affected by the events of the turbulent sixties, Sartori continued nonetheless in his indefatigable activity to find space for political science by advocating and obtaining a reform of the entire system of the existing traditional departments of political sciences (in the plural) up to then largely dominated by historians and law scholars, and subordinately by philosophers and sociologists. By the mid-seventies he had substantially achieved his paramount goal.
In 1971 Sartori founded and launched the first Italian academic journal fully devoted to political science: the Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica. He served as editor of the journal uninterruptedly until 2004, contributing to the expansion and consolidation of Italian political science. Fully involved in the major activities of the International Association of Political Science and of its Committee on Political Sociology, Sartori made friends with Martin Lipset, Juan Linz, Stein Rokkan, Mattei Dogan, Hans Daalder and Shmuel Eisenstadt and was frequently invited to several meetings, workshops, and symposia that led to the publication of important books, for instance J. LaPalombara and M. Weiner (eds.), Political Parties and Political Development (1966) and S. M. Lipset (ed.), Politics and the Social Sciences (1969). He also contributed two long and dense articles, “Democracy” and “Representational Systems” to the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (respectively, vol. IV and vol. XIII, 1968). His chapter in the book edited by LaPalombara and Weiner—“European Political Parties: The Case of Polarized Pluralism”—contained an anticipation of a landmark book published by Cambridge University Press in 1976, Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis. It was translated into several languages, even in Chinese. In 1998 it received the Outstanding Book Award from the American Political Science Association. Long out of print, almost thirty years after its publication, Parties and Party Systems was reissued as a classic by the European Consortium for Political Research. In my opinion, that book is more than a classic. It remains an insurmountable source of ideas, concepts, and comparative generalizations. Sartori’s typology of political parties retains the great merit of combining two criteria: the number of parties and their relevance (coalition potential and blackmailing power). In the meantime, Sartori had acquired the profound conviction that political science could advance along two paths: by becoming comparative and by acquiring the awareness that methodological and conceptual clarity is indispensable. His often quoted article “Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics,” published in the American Political Science Review, December 1970, stands out as a monument to the fundamental requirements of any commendable comparative analysis. In his capacity of chairman of the IPSA Committee on Conceptual and Terminological Analysis, Sartori edited a collection of fine analytical chapters, Social Science Concepts: A Systematic Analysis (1984). Several of his own essays have been edited by David Collier and John Gerring as Concepts and Methods in Social Science: The Tradition of Giovanni Sartori (2009).
Sartori’s first major book in Italian was Democrazia e definizioni (1957). It became a long-seller remaining in print in Italy for more than 20 years. Sartori translated and revised it himself for publication in English as Democratic Theory (1962). He continued working on the subject of democracy until the publication of the summa of his knowledge in The Theory of Democracy Revisited (1987) followed by yet another book in Italian Democrazia: Cosa è, several times revised and last republished in 2007.
Visiting professor of government at Harvard University (1964–1965), recurring visiting professor at Yale University (1966–1969), Sartori served as dean of the department of political sciences of Florence from 1969 to 1971. Then he spent one year (1971–1972) at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences of Palo Alto. Between 1974 and 1976 Sartori was asked to build the department of political and social sciences at the newly founded European University Institute in Florence. More or less in the same period he had received several invitations from Oxford University to Stanford University to join them. Finally, he accepted to become Gabriel A. Almond’s successor at Stanford where he taught from 1976 to 1979. His next step was to move to Columbia University that offered him the prestigious Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities. He lived, taught, and advised graduates students in New York from 1979 to 1994 when on his retirement the University granted him the title of emeritus professor. Still, Sartori could never refrain from criticizing, few exceptions apart, American political science for having taken a path that “I neither would nor could accept: excessive specialization (and thus narrowness) and excessive quantification” and that was leading, in his opinion, to “irrelevance and sterility.”
On his return to Italy he decided to settle in Rome where he started what was almost a second career, that of public intellectual. He had been writing editorials for Italy’s most important newspaper Corriere della Sera since 1969. The vicissitudes of Italian politics offered him and his political science the opportunity to put to work his analytical concepts and his theoretical generalizations, which he did with gusto. In his editorials and very frequent television appearances, invited because of his knowledge, dry wit, quick mind, and absolute independence, he denounced the conflict of interests, argued the case for electoral and institutional reforms, criticized what Italian parties were doing, and formulated proposals for change. His book Comparative Constitutional Engineering (1994) contains the necessary theoretical foundations and, as he has declared, leans heavily on “condition analysis”: “Whenever I provide causal explanations and make general assertions, I scan through, and control with, all the polities (as many as I manage to know of) that fall under any given generalization.” A propos the often disconcerting Italian institutional debate and reforms, three collections of his many articles are worthy to be mentioned: Mala tempora (2004), Mala Costituzione e altri malanni (2006), and Il sultanato (2009). Sartori, the public intellectual, never refrained from making scathing and abrasive comments. He did more than just speaking the truth to power. Quite often he bluntly told the powerful what they should do on the basis of the existing comparative knowledge.
Among his less scholarly, but always penetrating, works, Sartori was especially fond of Homo Videns, first published in Italian in 1997, almost immediately translated into Spanish, but only recently made available in English (subtitle “Television, Internet, and Post-Thinking”). His thesis went somewhat beyond the classical criticisms of television made by Sir Karl Popper. Sartori claimed that television has drastically modified the cognitive apparatus of homo sapiens, shrinking it in such a way that the “video-format man” is no longer capable of reasoning through abstractions and of understanding concepts.
Since 1992 Sartori had been fellow of the Italian Accademia dei Lincei and in 1995 he was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He continued to collect well-deserved honorary degrees (nine) and international prizes, among them: the Lifetime Achievement Award of the European Consortium for Political Research and the Prince of Asturias Prize in the Social Sciences in 2005; the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Political Science Association in 2006; the Karl Deutsch Prize from the International Political Science Association in 2009.
Extremely demanding and intellectually rigorous, continuously reminding his students and young colleagues of the utmost necessity to master all the existing literature, always in search of the most appropriate concepts, committed to the formulation and testing of probabilistic theories, and convinced that the present and the future of political science are conditioned on its ability to show and prove its relevance, Sartori has significantly contributed to many scholarly advancements in at least three fields: the study of democracy, the analysis of parties and party systems, and the comparative method especially with reference to constitutional engineering. His books will last and his teachings will remain, not only with me, as a lighthouse illuminating the path to what good, comparative political science can do in order to improve the quality of democracy and the knowledge and life of its citizens.
A truly outstanding scholar, Giovanni Sartori was not an easy man, and he was proud of the fact. Of course, old age mellowed him, but only a little. This said with his approval, all those who believe in the importance and relevance of political science, as I do, owe him a great deal. Many must be very grateful to him. I certainly am.
—Gianfranco Pasquino, University of Bologna
Richard H. Solomon
Richard H. Solomon, a China scholar and diplomat who led the United States Institute of Peace for 19 years (1993–2012) died March 13, 2017, from brain cancer at the age of 79. As a political scientist, Richard did path-breaking research on Chinese political culture and the negotiation styles of different countries. As a diplomat and peace builder, he applied these understandings to some of the most difficult challenges in conflict resolution in the contemporary world including Cambodia, the Philippines, the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In recognition of his exceptional contributions, Richard received the American Political Science Association’s Hubert H. Humphrey Award for notable public service by a political scientist in 2005.
Richard Solomon was a chemistry student at MIT when he discovered his fascination with political science and China. As a PhD student of MIT political scientist Lucian Pye during an era when no Americans were permitted to go to China, Richard learned Chinese and did psychological interviewing of Chinese subjects in Hong Kong and Taiwan to study the distinctive patterns of Chinese political culture. Building on Pye’s insights drawn from his childhood as the child of missionaries in China, Richard produced a landmark work of empirical social science on culture and personality in China, Mao’s Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture (University of California Press, 1971). Based on lengthy standardized interviews with almost 100 mainland-born Chinese that included Rorschach Tests and Thematic Apperception Tests, Richard identified the core features of Chinese traditional culture passed down through family socialization, including a dependency on authority. Turning his analytic lens to the personality of Mao Zedong, China’s autocratic leader, Richard showed how Mao’s conception of leadership involved mobilizing society to throw off the yoke of traditional values while at the same time drawing on the behavioral and emotional tendencies that he believed would strengthen his popular support. He identified the Chinese fear of “chaos” (luan) as a core cultural concept that Mao had skillfully manipulated. Richard, a crack photographer who appreciated the power of visual images, also published an original book of photographs and text, A Revolution is Not a Dinner Party (Anchor Press, 1975). Today Richard’s research findings may help us understand the surprising resilience of Chinese Communist Party rule over a highly marketized and internationally open society; Mao’s successor leaders continue to bolster support by socializing generations into the belief that the CCP is the only thing that stands between China and chaos.
After five years as a professor at the University of Michigan, Richard Solomon was recruited by Henry Kissinger in 1971 to join the National Security Council staff and provide the expertise to help normalize American relations with China. As a participant-observer he was able to study close-up the negotiation style of the Chinese officials as well as Kissinger, an experience that stimulated his fascination with cultural variation in negotiating behavior.
After departing government in 1976, he remained in the policy world as the head of the political science and social science departments of the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica. While at RAND he wrote a brilliant study of Chinese deft negotiating tactics that often resulted in their coming out ahead. The RAND monograph became a classic and its republished 1999 edition is a valuable guide for business and diplomatic negotiators (Chinese Negotiating Behavior: Pursuing Interests Through “Old Friends,” US Institute of Peace, 1999). Later, when he led the US Institute of Peace, Richard produced a series of studies of various countries’ negotiating styles, culminating in his own last coauthored book American Negotiating Behavior: Wheeler-Dealers, Legal Eagles, Bullies, and Preachers (US Institute of Peace, 2010), described by Henry Kissinger as “the definitive primer on the art of effective cross-cultural negotiating.”
In 1986, George Schultz recruited Richard Solomon to the State Department to be director of Policy Planning (1986–1989). Richard moved on to be Assistant Secretary for East Asia and Pacific Affairs following the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown when relations with China went into deep freeze. Much of his efforts involved resolving situations left over from the Cold War. His greatest achievement as assistant secretary was the successful negotiation for the first United Nations peacekeeping agreement for Cambodia, a country that had been torn apart by the brutal Khmer Rouge regime and the Vietnamese occupation.
As a highly successful peacemaker himself, Richard was a logical choice to be selected in 1993 as the third president of the US Institute of Peace (USIP). The USIP is an independent, nonpartisan organization funded by the US Congress. Over the 19 years he led USIP, Richard made the Institute into a vibrant center of international conflict management analysis and action. As his USIP colleague, Tara Sonenshine, put it, “Richard understood that peace was a process, not an end state.” His first major experiment was in the Balkans where after the Dayton Accords, USIP went “operational” by partnering on the ground to provide training to offer help to Albanian and Serbian officials, community leaders, and local parties. He successfully demonstrated that analysis and action could improve one another if they were combined creatively within one organization. Richard took USIP out into the world as a “think-and-do-tank” to mediate conflicts such as between the Philippine government and the insurgent groups in Mindanao as well as efforts to stabilize post-conflict Iraq. The institute trains future government ministers, legislators, and other leaders in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries. What USIP learns by working in the trenches of real world situations, it then feeds back into its analyses and policy recommendations, its publications, and its extensive public education activities. The beautiful USIP glass and concrete building with its roof shaped like dove-like wings, designed by Moshe Safdie that opened in 2011 in the last buildable site on the National Mall in Washington, DC, for which Richard raised the funds from private and public sources, will forever stand as a memorial to Richard Solomon’s contributions as a peace-maker scholar.
—Susan L. Shirk, University of California, San Diego
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