Our colleague John C. Blydenburgh passed away on August 17, 2021 at the age of 83. During the three decades John spent teaching political science, he made numerous contributions to the study of elections and voting behavior. Just as importantly, he was a major influence in the lives of his students and colleagues.
John was born and raised in Islip, New York. He had a promising high school baseball career, during which he allegedly once struck out Carl Yastrzemski, and he was recruited by the Brooklyn Dodgers. He chose instead, however, to join the AirForce, where he served for three years before going on to receive a B.A. from the State University of New York, Binghamton, and a PhD from the University of Rochester in 1969. He taught at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University from 1969 to 1975 and was then recruited by Clark University to chair the university’s recently founded Government and International Relations Department, where he remained until his retirement in 2003.
During his time at Rutgers, and subsequently at Clark, John published several well-received articles on the effects of voting rules in elections and in congress. In many ways his articles anticipated research that would follow in years to come. For instance, in his 1971 Journal of Politics piece, “The Closed Rule and the Paradox of Voting,” John developed a game theoretic account of the effects of closed rules in House Ways and Means Committee votes. He developed a theory based on the work of game theorists such as William Riker and Duncan Black, and then proceeded to test his theory using consequential committee votes of the mid-twentieth century. Similarly, in articles published in 1971 and 1976 in the American Journal of Political Science, he developed a formal model to predict when candidates for legislative office might find it advantageous to engage in personal contact with prospective voters, and then created an experiment in a New York legislative race to test his theory. John also published two books—Politics in New Jersey (Rutgers, 1975) and Political Science Statistics (Archon Books, 1973).
John served as a polling consultant for ABC News from 1969 through 2008. One account of John’s experience there, by WAMC radio personality Alan Chartock, suggests that John originally became involved in Election Night broadcasts because he was so witty on the air. In subsequent years, however, John would go on to design ABC’s original exit poll in 1978 and ABC’s House Model, which was used to project party control of the House of Representatives on Election Night. He became ABC’s senior news consultant, overseeing the network’s analysts for the general election and for some primary elections as well, during which he trained many new survey research scholars. Blydenburgh drew on his experience at ABC to write scholarly articles during the 1980s and 1990s on ways of distinguishing between strategic and sincere presidential voting (“Sophisticated Voting in the 1980 Presidential Election,” Political Behavior, 1988) and on measuring the influence of candidates’ issue positions on voters. At the time of his retirement from work with ABC, he expressed concern to his colleagues that network exit polling was becoming less accurate and that in the near future, general election results were likely to confound those who relied too heavily on pre-election polling.
John was a beloved teacher and colleague at Clark University. His teaching interests included courses on game theory, survey research methods, political behavior, political parties, and elections. His first-hand experience of election surveys inspired a generation of students and prompted many Clark students to pursue internships and careers in electoral politics. He chaired Clark’s Government and International Relations Department several times during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Colleagues recall this as a time when the department’s faculty was growing and becoming more diverse, and they credit him with exercising strong leadership in growing the department and in pursuing collaborative work between political scientists and colleagues in fields such as history, urban studies, and women’s studies. John also involved his colleagues in his work with ABC and on survey work and consulting for local governments and nonprofit organizations in Central Massachusetts. His expertise on elections led to the creation of Clark’s Public Affairs Research Center, which conducted public opinion polls on issues and voting in Massachusetts elections. Between 1977 and 1981 he directed the Clark Poll, a quarterly survey on issues of public concern in Massachusetts. He also chaired several major committees and served as Chair of the Faculty for several years.
Clark faculty have fond recollections of John’s mentorship and collegiality, including his annual holiday parties. Perhaps the most compelling piece of evidence of John’s support for his colleagues was his role in preparing Peter Natchez’s book Images of Voting, Visions of Democracy (Basic Books, 1985) for publication. Natchez died in 1981 at a young age from stomach cancer, leaving two book manuscripts unpublished. John worked in cooperation with Natchez’s wife and with other colleagues to organize these two manuscripts into a single book, and he contributed an introduction explaining the book’s importance.
By all accounts, John pursued a very active retirement; first in Massachusetts and then in Maine. He raised a herd of goats, made maple syrup, repaired old cider presses, became skilled at ceramics and a fixture of the St. George, Maine community, and established, once again, a reputation for hosting lavish holiday parties.
Although John Blydenburgh left Clark nearly two decades ago, his passing prompted an outpouring of emotion from his former colleagues and students—a testimony to the effect John had on Clark University, on political science, and on the public’s understanding of election politics.■
—Robert Boatright, Clark University
Robert A. Katzmann
Along with so many others, we mourn the passing of Robert A. Katzmann, senior judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Bob’s accomplishments as a scholar, a federal judge, and an institution-builder are likely to have a lasting impact. His personal characteristics—as a warm, caring, gentle, human being—fill us with both deep appreciation and a profound sense of loss.
Bob was the first political scientist to be appointed to the federal bench. He went on to become the Chief Judge of the prestigious Second Circuit Court of Appeals, based in New York City. Prior to that time, at the Brookings Institution and at Georgetown University, he wrote important books on the courts, Congress, and bureaucracy in which a central theme was the need for better cooperation between different branches of government and, more broadly, for mutual understanding and respect. How prescient he was, and how important that message is today!
Robert Katzmann was born on April 22, 1953 in New York City. His mother was born in Brooklyn; His father, an electrical engineer, escaped from Nazi Germany three years after Bob’s grandfather was killed by the Nazis during Kristallnacht.
Bob earned a B.A. degree with summa cum laude honors from Columbia University. He then earned a PhD in Government from Harvard University, where he studied with two legends: Daniel Patrick Moynihan and James Q. Wilson. He also received a law degree from Yale University.
After clerking for Judge Hugh H. Bownes on the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, Bob accepted a job at the Brookings Institution as a Fellow in the Governmental Studies Program. While at Brookings, he founded and headed the Governance Institute, an organization devoted to exploring, understanding, and ameliorating challenges associated with the separation of powers and federalism. After teaching part-time, he joined the Georgetown University faculty in 1992 as the Walsh Professor of Government and as a member of the Public Policy and Law faculties.
As a scholar, Bob was seldom content to focus on one branch of government at a time. For example, in Institutional Disability: The Saga of Transportation Policy for the Disabled (Brookings, 1986), he discussed flaws in each branch’s decision making processes which were exacerbated by limited understanding and cooperation. These misunderstandings, encompassing all three branches of government, led to numerous zigs and zags as the federal government tried to decide the relative importance of equity and efficiency in strategies for improving transportation access for disabled citizens.
In Courts and Congress (Brookings, 1997), Bob focused on problematic communications and understandings between the legislative and judicial branches and wrestled with the challenge of achieving “judicial independence in a system of interdependent responsibilities” (p. 3). His suggestions for improving the Senate’s “advice and consent” role are thoughtful and balanced. His critiques of leading theories of statutory construction, including the “textualist” approach and public choice theory, are trenchant, yet never mean-spirited. His recommendations for improving communications between the two branches are rooted in some original empirical research. He found that members of Congress are woefully unfamiliar with leading decisions made by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Bob makes a compelling case that this extreme separation is neither required nor salutary. A key conclusion is that direct communication between judges and legislators need not compromise judicial independence.
While writing books and articles, Bob was actively engaged in reforming the policymaking process. Over a period of years, he worked closely with the US Judicial Conference, the Administrative Office of the US Courts, the Federal Judicial Center, and other groups to strengthen communication and understanding across branches of government. Later, as a judge, Bob would serve as chair of the Judicial Conference’s Committee on the Judicial Branch. For his many scholarly achievements and for his practical efforts to actually improve government functions, Bob received the APSA’s prestigious Charles Merriam Award in 2001.
In 1999, President Bill Clinton nominated Bob to be a federal judge in the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Bob was the first federal court nominee who had both a PhD in political science and a law degree. At his Senate confirmation hearing, Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan (D-NY)—Bob’s mentor—praised Bob as “the finest lawyer/scholar of his generation.”
As a federal judge, Bob was wise, conscientious, collegial, and productive. He wrote many important opinions over the years, including two recent seminal cases: Zarda v. Altitude Express (2018) and Trump v. Vance (2020). In Zarda, the court confronted the question of whether discrimination based on sexual orientation violated Title VII’s prohibition on discrimination "because of… sex." In the majority opinion for the en banc court, Bob wrote that discrimination based on sexual orientation does indeed violate Title VII. Two years later, in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia (2020), the US Supreme Court upheld the Second Circuit’s ruling in Zarda, with Justice Gorsuch writing the majority opinion.
In Trump v. Vance, the Second Circuit had to address an issue that had become highly politicized—access to President Trump’s tax returns. At issue was whether the Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, had the right to subpoena Donald Trump’s accounting firm for tax returns in connection with a grand jury investigation. In a carefully drafted opinion that explores the history and origins of the concept of executive privilege, Bob concluded that presidential immunity does not preclude a county prosecutor from subpoenaing documents held by a third party. In 2020, the Supreme Court upheld the Second Circuit, with Chief Justice Roberts writing the opinion of the Court.
Somehow, despite the many duties of a federal judge, Bob found the time to write an important book, Judging Statutes (Oxford University Press, 2014). In this book, Bob weighs key arguments in favor of and against the use of legislative history by judges. This book, now in its 7th edition, is Bob’s most precious gift to future generations of law students, lawyers, and judges who must somehow try to grasp and operationalize statutory meaning.
Despite his many official duties, Bob remained remarkably generous with his time. We are particularly grateful that he brokered numerous educational events at Georgetown University, where we both teach. He was the driving force behind both the Bernstein Symposium and the Mullen Visiting Professorship, and he somehow found the time to ensure that both initiatives flourished. Over the years, participants in the Bernstein Symposium included Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Representative Stephanie Herseth Sandlin—who was one of Bob’s many graduate students. Mullen Professors included former Solicitors General Paul Clement and Seth Waxman. Even while serving on the court, Bob continued to be the impresario for the Bernstein Symposium and work with the Mullen Professorship. His devotion to the exchange of ideas was legendary.
During his years as a federal judge, from 1999 to 2021, Bob hired close to 100 law clerks. These clerks became members of Bob’s extended family. Bob encouraged them, praised them, guided them, advised them, dined with them, joked with them, and generally looked out for them. He and his wife, Jennifer Callahan, hosted annual chamber dinners, and he officiated at many clerks’ weddings. He even attended a karaoke party with them and once joined them on a Bolt Bus ride, which he later vowed never to do again. As one former clerk (litigator Susannah Weaver) put it: “He had an amazingly deep interest in his law clerks and a remarkable lack of ego for someone as brilliant and accomplished as he was.” Another former clerk, Georgetown Law Professor Eloise Pasachoff, recalls: “Judge Katzmann was a giant in the law, but he was also the best mentor anyone could hope for. He helped each of his law clerks discern our own individual career paths and opened doors for us at each step of the way. He was always ready to offer wise counsel or encouragement as complexities or roadblocks emerged.”
In 2014, Bob launched a civic education initiative, “Justice for All: Civic Education and the Community.” As he explained in a PBS interview, “civic education has had less priority across the country than it should.” To rectify that, he proposed that the courts assist boards of education seeking civic material for textbooks, bring teachers and students into the courtroom for a first-hand look at the judicial process, and reenact classic trials to highlight how the courts handle sensitive issues. A hallmark of these civic initiatives was distance learning opportunities, which proved all too timely during COVID. But Bob also wanted teachers and students to actually visit the courts and established a “Bench in Your Backyard” program to accomplish that. In his words, it is important “to bring the communities to the courts, and to bring the courts to the communities.”
Bob was also the leading force behind the creation of the Immigrant Justice Corps (IJC), which trains, hires, and pairs recent law school graduates with immigrants facing complex immigration proceedings who cannot afford a lawyer. Bob was passionate about creating an equal playing field for all US residents, irrespective of where they came from or how they got here. The IJC grew out of a 2007 lecture Bob gave at the New York City Bar Association, in which he described the crisis in legal representation for immigrants, with which he was all too familiar in his courtroom. Years of careful collaborative work within New York’s legal community, spearheaded by Bob, followed, culminating in the IJC’s successful launch in 2014. IJC’s Justice Fellows, working for a nonprofit organization, with support from private foundations, have served more than 80,000 immigrants and their families, with a success rate of 93%. Many of the Fellows are children of immigrants or first-generation immigrants themselves. What an amazing legacy in pursuit of equal justice for all!
Over the course of his career, Bob made a special effort to aid in the elevation of two women to the Supreme Court—Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg from the D.C. Circuit and Judge Sonia Sotomayor from his very own Second Circuit. In 1993, during the confirmation process, Bob served as Justice Ginsburg’s official chaperone and counselor, as she met with senators privately and testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He played the same role for Justice Sotomayor, his friend and colleague, in 2009. In one of many tributes to Bob, Justice Sotomayor said: “Bob has opened the doors to the courthouse to students, teachers, and the broader community with the goal of increasing public understanding of the courts and bringing the courts closer to the community.” In acknowledgments in her bestselling book, My Beloved World, Sotomayor expresses deep gratitude to three “brothers”—her birth brother, a lawyer friend who offered sage advice, and Bob Katzmann.
Greatness is an elusive concept, not easily defined. Yet, to paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, we believe we know greatness when we see it. Bob Katzmann was a great scholar and a great public servant, who seemed equally comfortable in the world of ideas and the world of public action and who sought with considerable success to bridge the gap between the two. He was also a great human being—a mensch who really cared about people as individuals and as members of a broader social community. Privately and publicly, he was the consummate bridge-builder.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, a friend, put it this way: “Bob had extraordinary intellectual gifts, a profound commitment to the law, and a deep devotion to public service. He was a distinguished federal judge on the Second Circuit, a creative legal thinker, and a gifted teacher.” If you met Bob and got to know him, you were better for it. Many who never met him, including victims of discrimination, immigrants without legal representation, and schoolchildren, are better for it as well. His impact on legal thinking and on public policy has been profound.
Bob is survived by his beloved wife, Jennifer, whom he married in 2006; his siblings and in-laws, with whom he was very close; and numerous nephews, nieces, cousins, close friends, colleagues, clerks, and interns.
In an interview on PBS, in 2017, Bob was asked if he worried about our country’s future. He replied, “I’m not worried about the republic. I have faith in our institutions. More than that, I have faith in our people.” Bob’s optimism and can-do spirit were contagious. His wisdom and good judgment were inspiring. His humanity and compassion were heartening. He will be sorely missed.■
—Bill Gormley and Tony Arend, Georgetown University
Mathew D. McCubbins
Mathew D. McCubbins passed away July 1, 2021. He was our colleague, collaborator, mentor, political scientist extraordinaire, and, above all, our friend. Mat received his B.A. from UC, Irvine in 1978, and an M.S. (1980) and PhD (1983) from the California Institute of Technology. His regular academic appointments were at the University of Texas, followed by appointments that included distinguished professorship at UCSD, USC, and, finally, Duke, where he was the Ruth D. Varney Professor in Political Science and Professor in Law. Appointments in multiple departments were common, peaking, perhaps, at USC where he was the Provost Professor of Business, Law, and Political Economy. He was an elected member of both AAASs, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The list of awards for his books and articles is long—and well deserved.
It would be hard to say what Mat is “most famous for”, but let’s point to a few candidates. We could certainly start with his second publication, the oft reprinted “Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols versus Fire Alarms” (with Thomas Schwartz), which displayed Mat and Tom (and one might say, political science) at their best. A brilliantly simple idea (one of his analogies) that communicates so easily and effectively to undergraduates and researching scholars alike. Just the mere idea that it is easier for congressional oversight to be run via “fire alarms,” that is, via people seeing agencies make mistakes or misbehave and alerting congress of their concern, rather than using the “police patrols” of congressional oversight of government agencies, classically understood (e.g., oversight hearings). Under the right conditions, observing few oversight hearings implies that Congress is doing its oversight job well—agencies are falling in line due to the anticipation of fire alarms (and consequences from fire alarms going off).
Or, and many would say more importantly, one could point to his various books with D. Roderick Kiewiet (The Logic of Delegation) and Gary Cox (Legislative Leviathan with both editions being important, and Setting the Agenda) on the role of political parties in Congress. The Logic of Delegation looks at political parties’ role in the appropriations process, with a take-away point that congressional parties work well when they delegate to the committees and subcommittees and seem apparently inactive. Legislative Leviathan and Setting the Agenda laid out the very influential account of congressional parties organized as cartels, often most influential in keeping gates closed (thereby setting the agenda when they open them to proposed legislation) and otherwise acting as the leviathan promised by the first book’s title.
Mat’s collaborations with Roger Noll and Barry Weingast (“McNollgast”) proposed a new way of thinking about the nature and purpose of administrative law. Historically, administrative law was viewed primarily as serving normative goals, such as to protect the due process rights of those affected by an agency’s decisions. The fundamental idea put forth by McNollgast again was simple: how can the coalition that enacts a statute assure that an agency will implement policy in a way that reflects its policy preferences, and does seemingly broad delegation of policy-making authority to an agency necessarily imply that Congress has lost control of shaping policy outcomes? McNollgast argued that administrative law allows Congress to exercise control over policy outcomes through the design of the procedures that an agency must use to implement policy. That is, an agency’s structure and processes are designed to “stack the deck” in favor of the policy preferences of the coalition that enacted them. Of course, for administrative law to be effective in achieving this purpose, Congress must rely on the courts to enforce procedural rules. Thus, the McNollgast approach yields an integrated theory of how Congress, the executive, and the courts interact to determine the policy outcomes that flow from a statute and the conditions under which each branch becomes dominant in determining policy.
Even more generally, Mat clarified how people think about important political decisions. This work focused on how people process information in adverse circumstances, including voting and statutory interpretation. He pioneered an interdisciplinary approach to these topics, perhaps most fully and clearly in The Democratic Dilemma with Arthur Lupia. He integrated vital insights about brains with a deep knowledge of incentives and institutions. This approach was creative and dynamic, and it revealed new ways to integrate rigorous game-theoretic reasoning with equally rigorous experimental design. Collectively, McCubbins’ work in these areas had a huge impact—it advanced scholarship, influenced a generation of researchers, and played a role in shaping the design of political institutions around the world.
Mat was interdisciplinary and, as the above attests, collaborative before it was fashionable to do so in the social sciences. He did so because he believed it led to better science, both in the near and long term. Much of his time interacting with teams of young scholars was to lead to better science and to better scientists in the long term, so that they could learn how to conduct the best work and be the best educators. He succeeded in this well beyond any reasonable expectations. This is to say that Mat had a profound impact on his many students, and this impact will perhaps be his greatest and most lasting influence.
Mat’s students sometimes found him to be gruff and critical; he was demanding, could be severe, and often was not easy to please. But those who were fortunate enough to have worked closely with him knew that his gruff exterior belied a warm, caring mentor who was fiercely loyal to, and generous with, his students. He cared deeply about all of them, providing unwavering support that continued long after his students finished graduate school. He viewed mentorship as a lifetime commitment. He frequently told his students, “I’ll be with you until you are a full professor.” As his many students can attest, he meant it.
Mat was unusual in that he viewed his students as apprentices and spent countless hours teaching them how to succeed in academia. This included heavy emphasis on analytic thinking, the scientific method, and research skills; it also encompassed exposure to every aspect of being a professor, especially to many aspects of service to the academy and to the institutional workings of universities.
Mat had his set of dictums that became all too familiar to his students: “Have a point” (whenever you say or write something); “What’s the analogy?” (Mat believed that all research should be guided by a central, organizing metaphor); “You get one point per paper, one point per book, one point per career—one point per lifetime. You get one point!” (Mat saw his one point as being that democratic government can flourish).
Sooner or later, students realized that Mat truly had a heart of gold, that he was tough on them because he knew that academic competition requires resourcefulness, and that ultimately Mat cared most about making their lives better.
The outpouring of grief and gratitude from dozens of Mat’s students since his passing is the same as that from his friends, colleagues, and many collaborators, and it reflects just how much he will be missed. He changed the lives of those who were fortunate enough to know the real Mat. We join so many others to say that we already miss him.■
— John Aldrich, Duke University
Cheryl Boudreau, UC, Davis
Gary Cox, Stanford University
James Druckman, Northwestern University
Chris Den Hartog, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo
Arthur Lupia, NSF and University of Michigan
Nate Monroe, UC, Merced
Roger Noll, Stanford University
Daniel Rodriguez, Northwestern University
David Bryan Robertson
Dave Robertson was a Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. He was 69 when he passed in October of 2020. A nationally recognized scholar of American political development, Dave was a beloved colleague, mentor, and leader during a long career at UMSL.
Dave was born and raised in and around Chicago. In an early sign of his future career, he carried a notebook all through high school filled with quotations about democracy. He earned an associate’s degree at the College of DuPage in 1972 and then attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, receiving his bachelor’s degree in political science in 1975. He went on to earn a PhD in political science from Indiana University in 1981, and landed his first faculty position that same year at the University of Texas–San Antonio.
Dave came to UMSL as an assistant professor in 1983. He earned tenure in 1989, was promoted to full professor in 2001 and received his appointment to Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor in 2008. He fervently believed that public universities, like UMSL, provide a ladder of upward mobility to students of modest financial means.
Dave was a beloved teacher, sharing his passion for politics and government during 37 years at UMSL. He inspired thousands of undergraduates in his Introduction to American Politics course and in advanced undergraduate courses on environmental politics, federalism, labor studies, and the presidency.
Dave also helped establish the PhD program in Political Science and he nurtured dozens of doctoral students at UMSL. He taught extraordinary graduate courses on American political development, political economy, and environmental policy. Among his many teaching honors at UMSL, in addition to the Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor appointment, were the Governor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2001 and the Chancellor’s and Emerson Electric Awards for Excellence in Teaching in 2002.
Much of Dave’s research examined the development of public policy in the United States and documented institutional barriers to effective policy making. For example, Dave and Dennis Judd undertook a historical and comparative analysis of American public policy in The Development of American Public Policy (1989). They argued that the fragmented institutions of the American government often stymie efforts to create effective and equitable policies. In Capital, Labor, & State (2000), Dave investigated why American labor market policy favors employers more than other industrialized democracies. By analyzing the development of labor policy over many decades, he found that American labor policy began to stand out around the turn of the 20th century. In addition, unique features of American institutions (competitive federalism, separation of powers, electoral systems) narrowed the policy agenda and limited the political strategies that labor unions could pursue.
Many critical features of American political institutions derive from the Constitution, and Dave devoted considerable time and effort to explain how the Constitution was created. In The Original Compromise: What the Constitution’s Framers Were Really Thinking (2013), he provided a detailed account of the diverging political interests that motivated the Founders and shaped the compromises needed to produce the Constitution. In The Constitution and America’s Destiny (2005), he also examined the politics of the Constitutional Convention, showing how the compromises that created the Constitution continue to make it difficult to create public policy in the United States. His American Political Science Review article, “Madison’s Opponents and Constitutional Design,” won the 2006 American Political Science Association award as the best article on politics and history.
Dave’s book Federalism and the Making of America (2012, with a second edition in 2017) is the definitive account of American federalism. In it, Dave explains how federalism is central to political conflict in the United States, and how the impact of federalism on public policy has accumulated over time. He also notes how federalism provides barriers and opportunities for those seeking policy change.
Dave spent the last years of his life researching the development of environmental policy in the United States. This work included a recently published article in Studies in American Political Development and a book manuscript project.
Dave’s research frequently emphasized that political institutions are created, inhabited, and changed by politicians motivated by their own political interests. For example, by treating the Founders as politicians and documenting the unanticipated compromises needed to create the new Constitution, he encourages readers to see the Constitution as a political document rather than an exalted philosophical treatise.
Despite the obstacles documented in his research, Dave remained optimistic that Americans of goodwill could form the political coalitions needed to produce sound policies and address the nation’s pressing problems. Each of his last three books ended with the word “idealism.”
Dave also was a public-facing scholar. He was a founding member of Scholars Strategy Network, and he also established and helped lead the Confluence chapter based in St. Louis. In that role he organized public events on current public policy issues, and he regularly published op-eds on political topics in local and national newspapers. He also served as a political analyst for news programs on KSDK TV (the local NCB affiliate). He was an oft-quoted voice on politics across the state of Missouri and beyond.
Dave held many leadership roles at UMSL and in the profession. Dave was a longstanding and active member of the Politics and History section of APSA. He served as section treasurer and he edited the section newsletter, CLIO, for many years. He also served as associate editor of the Journal of Policy History from 1991 to 2019. At UMSL, Dave was director of graduate studies from 1992 to 1995 and he served as chair from 1998 to 2001 and again from 2015 until 2020. In his many service roles Dave preferred to work behind the scenes. He was a humble, gracious, and respectful colleague, and he deployed a dry sense of humor to help defuse tension during faculty meetings. Dave retired from UMSL in the summer of 2020 and he moved to Arizona to be closer to his extended family. In a sign of his character, Dave moved up his retirement one year in order to spare the department deeper budget cuts during the coronavirus crisis.
Dave is survived by his wife, Cathie, to whom he was married for 47 years, as well as his son Bryan, daughter-in-law Elizabeth, and two grandchildren. Donations can be made in Dave Robertson’s memory to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation or an UMSL scholarship which the Department of Political Science is establishing in his name.■
—David C. Kimball, University of Missouri-St. Louis
Kumu Haunani-Kay Trask
With one fist raised she stood outside `Iolani palace, exactly one hundred years after the overthrow, chanting, “We are not Americans! We are not Americans! We will die as Hawaiians!” Dr. Haunani-Kay Trask’s declaration of our collective identity resounds across decades. The fire of her words burned them into the popular memory of our lāhui.
More than an iconic Kanaka activist, Kumu Haunani-Kay always saw herself as a teacher. Throughout the semester, she opened our minds, demanded our best, and showed us how our worlds, our day-to-day lives in Hawai`i, were political. Kumu Haunani’s legacy of scholarship, activism and artistry continues to stoke the flames of new generations.
The “slyly reproductive” reach of her scholarship, poetry and community work has critiqued tourism and militarization as major industries in Hawai`i and Oceania, highlighted the ways racism and colonialism are embedded within academic knowledge production, theorized questions of settler colonialism in multicultural democracies, explored the tensions between Indigenous nationalism and feminism, and amplified the struggles of everyday Native Hawaiians living under US occupation.
Kumu Haunani-Kay understood the ways her poetry, prose, pedagogy, public speech-making, and various other forms of activism were all interconnected and synergistic in the fight against structures of racism, sexism, colonialism and imperialism. She called this a “confluence of creativities.” She shows us that art at its best is political, and that politics is an art.
Haunani-Kay graduated from Kamehameha Schools in 1967. She entered college in Madison, Wisconsin at a height of US movements for Black freedom, women’s liberation, and an end to the war in Vietnam. Haunani-Kay quickly became involved in activism on campus, while training as a political theorist. As a graduate student who was also teaching, Haunani fought to have women’s studies and feminist theory courses included in her department, and she became part of a node of feminist organizing that would eventually result in nationwide changes in higher education, as women across the humanities, natural and social sciences organized to include women in the curriculum and on faculty.
In the middle of her doctoral program, Haunani-Kay returned home to O‘ahu, where she quickly emerged as a vocal opponent of US militarism, colonialism, racism, and sexism. The daughter of a political family who was well-connected in the Democratic party, Haunani-Kay made a clear decision not to focus on advancing Hawaiians through accommodation within the settler state. Instead, from the moment of her return in 1978, Haunani chose to work among Kānaka Maoli reviving aloha `āina. Against violences of the settler state, she chose radical activism for the health of Hawaiian lands, waters and communities, over participation in settler state politics.
For a short but intense two-year period, Haunani-Kay served as a community organizer, legal strategist, negotiator, and spokesperson for the Protect Kaho`olawe `Ohana and its non-profit arm. In June 1978—less than a year after her return home—a multi-island assembly of the PKO membership elected Haunani-Kay as O‘ahu representative for the ‘Ohana’s negotiations team.
As part of the PKO legal team, Haunani helped to secure regular access visits to the island and to limit the US Navy’s authority over this island sacred to Hawaiians. She juggled this activist labor along with an non-tenured teaching gig at the University of Hawai‘i (UH) and while completing her dissertation.
Through the 1980s Haunani-Kay’s grassroots activism continued to focus on Hawaiian knowledge, lands and waters, situated within a larger analysis of imperialism. At Sand Island, where Hawaiians and other people of color were fighting evictions by the State of Hawai`i, Dr. Trask helped to highlight that these were so-called “Ceded lands,” lands that should belong to a sovereign Hawaiian national government. She participated in fights against large-scale suburban development of He`eia wetlands, near her childhood home, and against the gentrification of Waimānalo, where she was living at the time and where a sizeable Native Hawaiian homestead community is located. In 1981, she was part of the Hawai‘i delegation that hosted the Nuclear Free Pacific movement on O‘ahu. It was during this conference that Indigenous Pacific Islander activists insisted that the name be changed to the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific, reflecting the sovereignty and decolonization aims of so many of the peoples involved in the anti-nuclear movement. That same year, she was also writing op-ed pieces on sexual violence as a social problem in the islands.
As one of the very first Native Hawaiian women to be hired as a professor at the University of Hawai`i, Dr. Trask was the first to openly speak out against white supremacy. She employed multiple forms of poetry and prose in an unapologetic rhetorical style that garnered local and national press attention, mainly due to her searing analyses of white supremacist racism in a place that had become known as a multicultural “melting pot” and “paradise.” Her public access television show, “First Friday,” was just one venue through which she launched such critiques. The show, co-hosted at various points with John Witeck, David Stannard, and Mililani Trask, was explicitly designed to bring issues of labor, race and indigeneity together. In an era before the Internet and social media, the show was a way to disseminate news and analysis filtered out by the mainstream media.
Once tenured at UH, Dr. Trask led the establishment and growth of a new Center for Hawaiian Studies. As a leader, she exposed structural inequalities in higher education and enacted ea in creating physical and intellectual spaces in the academy. The Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies could be called “the house that Trask built.” As the director, Dr. Trask established Hawaiian Studies as a degree-granting program, and she fought tooth and nail for a new brick-and-mortar building to house the Center. She actively engaged us—her students—in antiracist and anticolonial activism on campus. Learning-by-doing was central to the ways she taught us.
In addition to her teaching and administrative work, in print she began challenging white anthropologists who claimed authority to speak and write about cultural and political movements in Hawai`i and Oceania. The Trask-Keesing-Linnekin debates are still taught to this day in Pacific Islands Studies and Anthropology to help students think about issues of positionality and representational authority. Moreover, this line of debate helped to shift Pacific Island Studies toward decolonial orientations and carved space for more Indigenous practitioners in these fields.
For the last ten years of her career, most of her energy was spent continuing to fight for space for Hawaiians within the academy, recognizing the university as a ground of contention and a crucial terrain of struggle. She still stands out as an example of what it can mean for a Maoli woman to maneuver within white supremacist institutions and to initiate and establish Hawaiian places of learning. She was willing to sacrifice parts of herself and be a target of various forms of hate in order to open space for more just and healthy Hawaiian futures to emerge.
Writing poetry and teaching about Pacific Islander women poets energized her through tough times. Throughout her career—in her written and spoken words—Kumu Haunani grappled with the rage and despair that arose from being a daughter of survivors of what she described as a nearly-apocalyptic genocide, coupled with the celebration and hope in those who have persisted. Dr. Trask’s impact continues to be evident all over the University of Hawai‘i and far beyond, even though she retired over a decade ago.
Empowering her students to forge their own futures was essential to her role as a kumu. Today, many Kanaka scholars in various fields are her former students, or have been profoundly influenced by her work. Her poetry has inspired and been analyzed by a new generation of Hawaiian and Oceanic literary scholars/practitioners. In 2019, when Kumu Haunani was honored as the recipient of the Angela Y. Davis award, the great Dr. Davis said, “It’s up to all of us to live up to the legacy that she has forged.”■
—Noelani Goodyear-Ka`ōpua, University of Hawi`i at Mānoa
Michael D. Ward
We are deeply saddened by the passing of our mentor and friend, Michael D. Ward, which occurred on July 9, 2021. Mike had a huge impact on the profession and innumerable people within it. His passing is a tremendous loss for the discipline and the many colleagues, students, and friends he touched. We extend our deep sympathies to Mike’s family, who include Sandra and Chris.
Mike was an innovative scholar who published over 136 articles, books, and book chapters, making significant contributions in international relations and political methodology as well as political geography and data visualization. Mike was a long-standing member of the American Political Science Association, served on the editorial boards of both the American Political Science Review and American Journal of Political Science and took organizational and editorial positions across the discipline, but especially in the International Studies Association and the Society for Political Methodology.
Mike had a long academic career at institutions across multiple countries. He received a PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University in 1977. At Northwestern, Mike worked with Harold Guetzkow on foreign policy decision making and simulating global interactions. His doctoral dissertation on the political economy of inequality, which was later published as The Political Economy of Distribution: Equality Versus Inequality (Elsevier-North Holland, 1978), drew attention to the role of international factors and domestic processes on multiple facets of inequality beyond simply monetary income.
From Evanston, Mike moved to the Science Center in West Berlin, Germany (Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin, WSB) —a city Mike knew from his days in the US Army at the frontline of the Cold War. While at the WSB, he worked on the GLOBUS model, an important early effort to model international relations, simulate trends and forecast state behavior in the international system.
Mike returned to the US in 1982 to take up a tenured position at the University of Colorado, Boulder. This marked the start of his long and sustained career working closely with PhD students; his first doctoral supervisee, Kun Y. Park, defended his dissertation in 1989. While at Colorado, Mike built and directed the Globalization and Democratization Program and the Center for International Relations. In 1987 he was awarded the ISA’s Karl Deutsch Award, recognizing young scholars judged to have made significant contributions to the study of International Relations and Peace Research.
Mike’s wife, Sandra, was recruited to Microsoft, prompting Mike’s move to the University of Washington in 2007. During his years in Seattle, Mike was the principal instigator and designer of the political science department’s graduate program in political methodology and instrumental in the formation of the innovative, cross-disciplinary Center for Statistics in the Social Sciences. The center has gone on to considerable fame and served as an organizational template for similar initiatives at several other universities. In 2009, Mike moved to Duke University where he founded WardLab to work with postdocs and graduate students on the innovative Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS). While at Duke, he contributed to reforms to methods training and helped a generation of PhD students work on the frontier of disciplinary research on networks and forecasting. Mike remained at Duke until formally retiring in 2019. After retiring he continued to produce academic research alongside his consulting work via his company, Predictive Heuristics.
Mike’s research interests were diverse and varied, but we would like to highlight a few of the areas where he made significant and enduring contributions. Mike had a long-standing interest in the study of defense spending and arms races. In an early study with Thomas Cusack in 1981, he noted that the traditional Richardson model was unable to provide a satisfactory account of military spending of the USA, USSR, and People’s Republic of China. In his first article in the American Political Science Review, appearing in 1984 (“Differential paths to parity: A study of the contemporary arms race”), Mike developed an important way to address the shortcomings of the standard framework, proposing a stock-flow model where states react to both budgets and military personnel. He also carried out important studies of defense spending in a range of individual countries, including France, India, Israel, and South Korea. Unlike many other scholars who examined military expenditures and their effects in ad hoc statistical frameworks, Mike’s work displayed close attention to established models of economic growth and often involved close collaboration with economists. In a 1992 in the American Political Science Review (“Sizing up the peace dividend: Economic growth and military spending in the United States”), Mike and his co-author, David R. Davis, quantified the negative impact of military spending on the US economy and simulated the likely “peace dividend” that would result from the end of the Cold War.
Mike is perhaps most well-known for his interest in the role of space and geography in international relations. Anticipating the recent explosion of interest in space and geographical data in the social sciences, Mike pioneered the study of spatial dependence and geographic effects in international relations, well before notions of globalization and diffusion became the buzz-words they are now. Following a long-standing collaboration with the geographer John O’Loughlin, Mike was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to study the diffusion of democracy in 1995. The guiding insight in the project was that international factors are likely to have a major impact on the prospects for transitions to democracy and the viability of specific regime types. This line of work produced substantive and methodological contributions including a paper that won the 2002 Warren Miller award from the Society for Political Methodology as well as Mike’s most cited article—“Diffusion and the international context of democratization” in International Organization with Kristian Skrede Gleditsch.
Mike’s interest in spatial interdependence led naturally to a sustained interest in the burgeoning field of network science. In work with statistician Peter Hoff, Mike generalized the notions of geography, distance, and dependence to more abstract, high-dimensional “latent spaces.” Early applications of this approach succeeded in mounting a penetrating challenge to the so-called “Kantian Tripod” version of the democratic peace conjecture. And Mike helped train a new generation of social scientists who have themselves helped build and refine these network- analytic tools while applying them to international conflict, trade, foreign direct investment, treaties, and outbreaks of civil war and political violence.
Across these substantive and methodological projects, Mike became an early and vocal advocate for “predictive heuristics,”that is, evaluating both specific statistical models as well as broader theoretical claims based on their ability to accurately predict new events not used to develop the initial model or theory. In a key 2010 article with Kristin Bakke and Brian Greenhill (“The perils of policy by p-value: Predicting civil conflicts,” Journal of Peace Research), Mike examined the predictive ability of two well-known models of civil war onset, demonstrating that models with good in-sample fit and statistically significant coefficients will nevertheless provide poor predictions for new cases excluded from the initial estimation.
Some might see this as affirming the old cliché that “prediction is difficult, especially about the future” and conclude that researchers should content themselves with statements about the past. But Mike saw first-hand how policy-makers tended to extrapolate from academic research to make forecasts about new situations. He set off on a sustained research agenda to show how conflict prediction could be improved. In this line of research, Mike drew heavily on insights from his previous work such as the importance of space and networks, but also picked up many new tools such as advanced event history models of heterogeneous populations, Bayesian model averaging, and machine learning.
He cooperated on several projects that included key decision-makers, including important work for the Political Instability Task Force, a US government-sponsored research project seeking to examine how best practices in research can inform US national intelligence and government policies. In a 2016 article (“Can we predict politics? Toward what end?,” Journal of Global Security Studies), Mike wrote an impassioned plea for prediction as an end for research and evaluation of learning, including a deliberately provocative “call for less theory in security studies,” advocating instead to “winnow the many, many such ‘theories’ that occupy the world of security studies” through “more predictions” (p. 84).
In recognition of his numerous methodological contributions as well as deep involvement in building and sustaining political methodology as the field it is today, Mike was inducted as a Fellow of the Society for Political Methodology in 2013 and received its highest honor—the Career Achievement Award—in 2018.
A number of common themes run through Mike’s scholarship and practice. First is an enduring curiosity and a willingness to explore new approaches, rather than sticking with past successes, even when such lower-hanging fruit might have clearer short run pay-offs. A second is interdisciplinarity. Mike engaged with developments in many disciplines and co-authored with scholars from computer science, economics, geography, and statistics. Mike drew broadly from cognate disciplines both for inspiration and applications. This taste for crossing boundaries included subfields within political science Mike was instrumental in Duke’s re-imagining and reorganization of its political science department around broad research themes rather than traditional subfields. A third is an emphasis on collaboration and building community. Mike believed in building working groups, integrating numerous scholars and students at many different career stages, and his co-authored scholarship demonstrated that we can learn more as members of teams than as individual scholars. Many of Mike’s research teams included contributors from outside the borders of the USA, and he had an enormous impact and reputation internationally. He had a longstanding affiliation with the University of Grenoble-Alpes (formerly Pierre Mendès France), first as a foreign invited professor in 1990, and published several articles in French.
But what stands out most to us is the limitless generosity and dedication Mike showed to his students and collaborators. To be sure, Mike could be demanding and temperamental, but he spent an enormous amount of time with others, taking a real interest in their work, and making constructive suggestions on how to improve it. We are struck by how many of his former students have started their tributes by stating that they would never have finished their degree without Mike’s help and mentorship. Indeed, it is a testament to the length and depth of Mike’s mentoring relationships that his retirement party was attended by dozens of academics and non-academics of all ages living across many countries. Among his students and collaborators, Mike will be remembered for his broad and trouble-making intellect, his sharp wit, and his boundless generosity.
It will take a long time for many of us to process the absence of Mike in our lives and accept that we will never share another laugh or an eureka moment together. However, we will treasure the many memories that we have of Mike, and try to honor his legacy by trying to show the same kind of generosity and mentoring that Mike showered upon us. We plan to honor Mike and have a roundtable on his work and legacy at the 2022 annual conference of the International Studies Association.■
—John Ahlquist, University of California, San Diego
David R. Davis, Emory University
Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, University of Essex & Peace Research Institute Oslo
Erik Wibbels, Duke University
