Philip Abbott

Philip Abbott, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Wayne State University, passed away on April 23, 2019. Phil was born in Abington, Pennsylvania in 1944 and taught at Wayne State University for 45 years.

My first meeting with Phil was on the initial evening of my interview for the chair’s position at Wayne State political science in 2004. Although we both received our doctorates from Rutgers University, Phil was years ahead of me in the program and I knew him only by his reputation among the graduate students. For my interview at WSU, the dean of arts and sciences invited Phil to the dinner with us at the top of the Renaissance Center, and the reason was clear: to introduce me to the most accomplished faculty member in the department. I joined Wayne State as chair of the Department of Political Science that August, and one of the principal reasons for my decision was the opportunity to work with a scholar of the stature of Philip Abbott.

Professor Abbott is the author of 14 books and three edited volumes. These works are among the most important in the fields of political theory and the American presidency. His book Political Thought in America is the leading text on American political theory. Professor Abbott’s prodigious scholarly record also includes the authorship of roughly ten chapters in edited collections. He published over 35 sole-authored articles in such prestigious journals as Perspectives on Politics, Polity, the Journal of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, Political Theory, and Presidential Studies Quarterly. This immense body of exceptional work established Philip Abbott as one of the leading scholars in the discipline of political science.

Phil received his BA from American University in 1966 and his PhD from Rutgers in 1971. He began his work as an assistant professor at Wayne State in 1970 and was promoted to full professor in 1980. Long recognized as one of the nation’s foremost political theorists, Phil had a profound appreciation for the relevance of his subject matter to contemporary life and its value in illuminating real world ethical dilemmas. His works exhibited uncommon sensitivity to such issues, setting him apart from others working in the field of political theory. In the 1990s Professor Abbott began to receive national recognition for his research in an additional field—the American presidency. It was in this area of specialization that Phil’s reputation achieved even greater heights. Five of his last eight critically-acclaimed books analyzed the office and role of the presidency, strong and weak presidents, untimely presidential successions, and a masterwork on Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In keeping with Philip Abbott’s extraordinary record of scholarship, he was the recipient of prestigious external awards, including his appointment by the American Fulbright Association as the Thomas Jefferson Professor of American Political Institutions at the University of Amsterdam. Professor Abbott was also the recipient of every major internal award for scholarship that Wayne State University confers. He was the first member of the faculty of the Department of Political Science—and one of the few faculty members in liberal arts—to be inducted into the Academy of Scholars. He was the recipient of two Board of Governors’ Faculty Recognition Awards, one for his book Furious Fancies: American Political Thought in the Post-Liberal Era, and a second for his two books, Seeking Many Inventions: The Idea of Community in America and States of Perfect Freedom: Autobiography and American Political Thought. Among Philip Abbott’s other awards were a Gershenson Distinguished Faculty Fellowship, a Distinguished Graduate Faculty Award, and the Michigan Association of Governing Boards of Higher Education Award. In recognition of his stellar accomplishments as a scholar, Dr. Abbott was named Distinguished University Professor in 2005—the highest academic honor the university can bestow.

Philip Abbott’s remarkable record extended as well to his teaching and service. He directed over 10 doctoral dissertations and over 25 masters theses. Professor Abbott taught a large number of undergraduate and graduate courses including the required doctoral seminar “Philosophic Problems of Social and Political Inquiry.” In recognition of the superb quality of his teaching, Dr. Abbott received both the University’s Graduate Mentor Award and the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Lastly, Phil Abbott made huge contributions to the governance of the department, the college, and the university as a whole. He served as an elected member of the department’s Policy and Personnel Committee and as its chair for nearly 20 years. Professor Abbott held the role of assistant dean and graduate officer of the College of Liberal Arts for three years, served one or more terms on over half a dozen college committees, and in 2001 was named president of the Liberal Arts Faculty Council. Dr. Abbott was an elected member of the Academic Senate for over a decade, and he chaired the Policy Committee of that body over a period of multiple years. In toto, his service to the university included membership on over 30 different standing or ad hoc units and committees.

In closing, I wish to note that Philip Abbott’s reputation as a scholar and the status he conferred on the Department of Political Science, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Wayne State University is without equal. With his passing, the university and the discipline have lost a great scholar, the department has lost its leader, Patti, Megan, Josh and Kevin have lost a husband, father, and grandfather—and I have lost a friend. Nevertheless, the insight and wisdom provided in his works live on.

—Daniel S. Geller, Wayne State University

Robert (Bob) Agranoff

Robert Agranoff, a leading scholar and practitioner of politics who provided a groundbreaking intellectual bridge between political science and public administration, died at age 83 in Bloomington, Indiana on November 14, 2019. His wife, Susan Klein, was by his side through sickness and health for more than 30 years and at the time of his death.

Bob was professor emeritus at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA) at Indiana University, Bloomington. Bob joined the faculty at SPEA in 1980 after spending 14 years in the public administration division of the department of political science at Northern Illinois University (NIU). The theme of Bob’s work and life reflected, in his words, “a sensitivity to the world of theoretical understanding linked to practice.” From his pre-college years in the US Navy as a hematology technician to his final year at SPEA in 2001 as the school’s associate dean, Bob was a keen observer of human behavior in organizations. He learned quickly that there was a lot going on in politics and governance not revealed in the New York Times or in popular press books on government. He made it his life’s work to learn how politics and governance operate in practice.

While studying political science as an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls, Bob became involved in student government and political campaigning. He worked extensively with the Democratic (Democratic Farmer Labor) party in Minnesota and his doctoral work at the University of Pittsburgh involved on-the-ground research while in residence at the party headquarters. He gained additional practical experience when he took a leave from NIU during his third year on the faculty and became the full-time legislative affairs director at the state headquarters and then served as the party’s lobbyist at the state legislative session. His administrative experience with the DFL party guided the rest of his career.

Early in his career, Bob published two pieces on campaign management: the edited volume The New Style in Election Campaigns in 1972 on technical, organizational, and communications changes that had transformed political parties; and The Management of Election Campaigns in 1976. While undertaking his work and research on campaigning, Bob also saw that legislators had great ideas for new legislation that led to new programs, but virtually all lost interest in making the new laws work. There was little sense among the legislators that government programs go through a vast implementation chain involving many different entities, thus there was very little theoretical guidance for practitioners charged with effectively carrying out programs. Bob’s fundamental and life-long concern for tightening the theory-practice linkage was expressed in the preface of his 1976 book:

For more than 50 years, Bob Agranoff contributed to the evolution of political science and public administration thought in many ways. He was what we might call “old school” today in that he believed strongly that improving good governance for leaders and citizens is the raison d’être of the fields of public policy and administration. Research and practice are intertwined inconvertibly, in his view, and the ultimate measure of one’s work in academia is the extent to which positive and productive change in society was informed by that work.

Bob was seemingly always ahead of the scholarly curve. He was successful at nearly single-handedly creating a new and consequential subfield in public administration, a claim that few can make. Bob was one of the first scholars to study explicitly the practice of public administration as an intergovernmental and interorganizational administrative phenomenon. His early work in human services administration and then in city government and development demonstrated both the value and the difficulties of integrating and coordinating services across levels of government. His most important and recognized contributions are in the study of intergovernmental and intersectoral collaboration in networks, which became generically associated with “collaborative public management.”

The culmination of this work, Collaborative Public Management: New Strategies for Local Governments (co-authored with Michael McGuire), was honored with both the 2003 Louis Brownlow Book Award from the National Academy of Public Administration and the 2014 Martha Derthick Book Award from the American Political Science Association for “the best book on federalism and intergovernmental relations published at least 10 years ago that has made a lasting contribution to the study of federalism and intergovernmental relations.” Other research in the field of collaborative administrative networks includes a book published in 2007 titled Managing within Networks: Adding Value to Public Organizations, which was recognized with two best book awards: one from the Section on Public Administration Research from the American Society for Public Administration and one from the Public and Nonprofit Management section from the Academy of Management.

Professor Agranoff taught numerous courses in public administration and organization theory, inspiring both undergraduate and graduate students to take up the call of public service. At Indiana University, he chaired and served on scores of dissertation committees for students who were interested in his knowledge of organization and interorganizational theory. His nearly 20 year association as a senior faculty in the Government and Public Administration Program at the Instituto Universitario, Fundación Ortega y Gasset, in Madrid, Spain, also led to him chairing dissertation committees, lecturing, and teaching courses for students across Spain and around the world. It should be noted that Bob was teaching courses in intergovernmental and intersectoral networks well before anyone else in the field had even recognized the scholarly and practical importance of the subject matter.

His dedication to the nexus of theory and practice is exemplified by the time and treasure he provided to the profession. He served on the editorial boards of no fewer than 15 journals and chaired or served as a member on several committees through various professional and research associations. His consultancies in public administration and public service, dating back to the late 1960s, include numerous federal, state, and local government agencies such as USAID, USDA, OPM, and NSF; many nonprofit organizations; universities; foundations; and MPA programs at various institutions.

His most endearing contribution to public administration was through his service in the community. He served on local boards of organizations that address concerns such as mental health, development disabilities, autism, rehabilitation, youth, and aging. His genuine concern for the successful planning and delivery of government programs came through not just in his research. Like the old “pol” that he was, he offered his time, over 50 years, to help steer organizations toward greater effectiveness. His life is a model for public administration scholars worldwide.

—Michael McGuire, Indiana University, Bloomington

Alan Cairns

We are deeply saddened by the passing of our colleague and former department head, Professor Emeritus Alan Cairns, who passed away on August 27, 2018. We extend our sincere condolences to his family and friends. Alan is remembered as a kind, generous and supportive colleague, and as a foremost scholar whose work shaped political thought in Canada.

Alan Cairns (PhD Oxford) was an integral member of our department from 1960 to his retirement in 1995, serving as department head from 1973 to 1980. He had a wry humour, was a caring mentor, and his scholarship shaped generations of scholars who engaged with his ideas.

Alan held visiting appointments at Harvard, University of Toronto, Memorial University, University of Edinburgh, Queen’s University, University of Saskatchewan, and York University. Following his retirement, he became an adjunct professor at the University of Waterloo. Alan was an officer of the Order of Canada and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Alan was passionate about the constitutional future of Canada, and issues that were of great concern to Canadians. Colleagues have remembered him as a giant in our field; a thinker whose work was contentious and ground-breaking for its time, shaping the study of constitutional reform, federalism, indigenous politics, citizenship, along with ideas about the “embedded state,” “bringing the state back in”, and the electoral system.

Alan was a leading authority on federalism and governance. He also served as a member of the British Columbia Advisory Committee on the Constitution, leading up to the 1982 Constitution Act. Alan studied the relationship between Canada and indigenous peoples, first as a member of the Hawthorn Commission in the 1960s which recommended a “citizens plus” status for indigenous peoples. This was used by some First Nation leaders to criticize the assimilation policies of the federal government’s 1969 white paper. Alan returned to the topic in his prize-winning book Citizens Plus (2000).

Alan’s major articles are reprinted in three volumes: Constitution, Government and Society in Canada (1988), Disruptions (1991) and Reconfigurations (1995), all edited by Douglas Williams. In 2001, a conference entitled: “Rethinking Citizenship in the Canadian Federation: A Conference in Honour of Alan C. Cairns” was held at UBC.

Alan received honorary degrees from Carleton University (1994), the University of Toronto (1996), the University of British Columbia (1998) and the University of Saskatchewan (2002). Other awards included the Molson Prize of the Canada Council, and a Killam award.

Alan was born in Galt, Ontario in 1930, and studied political science at the University of Toronto, graduating in 1953 with first a BA and later an MA in political science in 1957. He earned his PhD at Oxford University in 1965, and his thesis was on British reactions to Central African society 1840–90, which was later published as Prelude to Imperialism (1965).

This in memoriam previously appeared on the University of British Columbia Department of Political Science website, and has been reprinted with permission from the authors.

—Faculty of Political Science, University of British Columbia

Jameson (Jim) Doig

Jameson “Jim” Doig, a distinguished and wide-ranging scholar, an active university citizen, and a beloved and dedicated teacher, passed away at the age of 86 in Hanover, New Hampshire on October 19, 2019.

After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1954, Jim served for two years as an officer in the United States Navy, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant. He came to Princeton to pursue graduate studies, earning a master’s degree in public administration in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1958, a master’s degree in politics in 1959, and a PhD in politics in 1961. While pursuing his graduate work he was both a Ford Foundation Metropolitan Region Fellow and a research associate at The Brookings Institution. He joined the Woodrow Wilson School and the politics department as an assistant professor in 1961, became a full professor in 1970, and transferred to emeritus status in 2004.

Jim made his greatest scholarly impact with his many published works—spanning over half a century—on metropolitan governance and transportation politics and policy in greater New York City. His three major books on this topic are: Metropolitan Transportation Politics & the New York Region (Columbia University Press, 1966), New York: The Politics of Urban Regional Development, co-authored with Michael N. Danielson (University of California Press, 1982), and finally his magisterial Empire on the Hudson: Entrepreneurial Vision and Political Power at the Port of New York Authority (Columbia University Press, 2001). Jim continued to publish scholarly articles and public commentary on metropolitan transportation issues well into his 80s. He also became one of the leading US commentators on Canadian constitutional law and history during his retirement years.

Jim’s scholarly expertise and published works extended to a wide range of topics, which included leadership and innovation among public administrators, federalism, Canadian politics, and many aspects of law and public policy. The excellence and wide influence of his scholarship is reflected in the awards he garnered, which included the Herbert Kaufman Award of the APSA in 1989; the Abbott Payson Usher Prize of the Society for the History of Technology in 1995; the Aaron Wildavsky Award of the Policy Studies Organization in 1997; the New Jersey Humanities Council Book Award in 2002; and the Abel Wolman Award of the Public Works Historical Society in 2002.

Jim’s scholarship focused on matters of great public importance, and his advice and counsel were widely sought by policy makers in New York, New Jersey, and Washington, DC. His public service over many decades included stints as a member of numerous policy advisory boards to New Jersey governors, urban and regional authorities, and foundations. He was a member, and for three years the vice-chair, of the Governor’s Advisory Council on Corrections, State of New Jersey, 1977–82. He was a member of the Judicial Planning Committee on Probation, State of New Jersey (by appointment of the Chief Justice), 1981–82, and chair of its subcommittee on state-level coordination. Jim served as consultant to the New York City Department of Investigation in 2012–2014, and was a commissioner of the Connecticut River Joint Commissions of New Hampshire and Vermont from 2014 until the time of his death.

Jim’s leadership was also sought within the university. He served as chair of the Department of Politics from 1997–2000, and was the founding director of the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice in the Department of Politics, from 2000–04. Within the Woodrow Wilson School, he served a brief stint as associate dean, and directed the program on criminal justice for 20 years.

Jim’s second great intellectual home was Dartmouth College, from which he graduated in 1954, and to which he returned in retirement, in 2008, first as distinguished visiting scholar and then visiting professor of government.

Jim’s infectious enthusiasm for scholarship, teaching, and mentorship extended through his retirement and to the time of his death. Knowing of his expertise on the peace process in Northern Ireland, a colleague engaged Jim to help advise a politics department junior, Emily Smith, on her junior paper on that subject in 2017. That was such a smashing success that Emily engaged Jim to be her senior thesis adviser in 2017–18. As Emily reports, “Jim truly changed my Princeton experience for the better, and he was such a wonderful adviser and mentor to me over these past three years. I learned so much from him and feel so fortunate that I was able to be advised and mentored by such a warm, passionate scholar and educator. He was a large influence in my life, and I will miss our check-ins and chats. I am so grateful to have met Jim.”

Jim Doig married Joan Nishimoto in 1955, and she survives him. They had three children, Rachel, Stephen, and Sean.

— Stanley Katz, Princeton University

— Stephen Macedo, Princeton University

Dan S. Felsenthal

Dan S. Felsenthal, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Haifa in Israel, died in Jerusalem on February 20, 2019, at age 80 following a period of declining health. Over the course of a career that spanned more than 50 years and that included frequent visits to the UK and an extended stay in the US, Dan made major contributions to mathematically oriented political science and public choice—in particular, the study of social choice, voting power and procedures, coalition formation, and other applications of game theory to politics.

Dan was born and raised in Jerusalem. His father was born in Mannheim, Germany, and studied ophthalmology at the University of Heidelberg, thereafter joining the third generation of physicians in his Jewish family. In 1935, he escaped from Germany and emigrated to British mandated Palestine, where he met his wife, the daughter of a prominent Sephardic Jewish family that had lived in Jerusalem for at least seven generations. He subsequently volunteered to serve in the British army as a physician for the duration of World War II. Dan was 10 years old and living in Jerusalem at the time of the declaration of independence of the state of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli War, events which left a deep impression on him.

Dan’s father joined the ophthalmology department in the main hospital in Haifa in 1950, and the family moved to Haifa, where Dan graduated from high school. Like all Israelis, he was drafted into the military and served as an army aerial photographer. In 1962 Dan married Ilana Klionski, who would have her own academic career, and together they raised three daughters, Noorit, Karni, and Ayala. In the meantime, Dan enrolled at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, studying political science and economics as an undergraduate and staying on to earn an MA in political science. He submitted his thesis (on Israeli government policy towards higher education) days before the outbreak of the Six Day War, in which he participated as an army reservist. Immediately after the war, Dan was awarded his MA degree with honors.

Shortly thereafter, the Felsenthal family moved to Boston. With the support of a Fulbright Fellowship, Dan enrolled in the PhD program in political science at MIT while Ilana studied at the Harvard School of Education. Dan’s dissertation dealt with healthcare policymaking and administration. He then spent a postdoctoral year at the Harvard School of Public Health doing further research on the role and experiences of immigrant physicians, such as his father; this research led to his first published articles, which appeared in medical journals. A year after Dan and Ilana’s youngest daughter was born in Boston, the family decided to explore the US beyond the East Coast; they set out on a three-month road trip around the country, driving an old Ford Country Squire station wagon and towing an even older tent trailer.

In 1972 the family returned to Jerusalem and Dan joined the political science department at the Hebrew University while Ilana joined its School of Education. There he became a mentor to PhD student Abraham Diskin, with whom he subsequently collaborated in many research projects and publications. When Haifa University acquired independent academic status, Dan joined its School of Political Sciences and began a long period of commuting between Jerusalem and Haifa. In 1976, he published a two-volume text (in Hebrew) on Mathematics for Administrative Decision Makers as well as a coauthored article in Administrative Science Quarterly and subsequently a solo-authored article in the Public Administration Review. But otherwise, his attention turned to topics within the developing field of public choice theory. Over the next two decades, Dan published more than two dozen articles on such topics as the bargaining problem, bargaining processes, international conflict and cooperation, coalition formation and payoffs, voting methods (in particular, approval and cumulative voting), sincere versus sophisticated voting (particularly in large elections rather than committees), and electoral systems. These papers appeared in such leading international journals as Behavioral Science, Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, Games and Economic Behavior, International Interactions, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Political Behavior, Public Choice, Simulation and Games, and Theory and Decision, and as chapters in several edited volumes. Many of these papers were written in collaboration with other leading Israeli political scientists—notably Diskin, Amnon Rapoport, and Zeev Maoz. Some of this work was summarized and extended in his book Topics in Social Choice: Sophisticated Voting, Efficacy, and Proportional Representation (Praeger, 1990).

During one of Ilana and Dan’s annual visits to London in 1989, he began collaborating informally with Moshé Machover, who was both Ilana’s cousin and a highly respected mathematician and logician in the philosophy department at King’s College, University of London. As his thoughts were never far from the puzzles and paradoxes that beset his ever growing interest in voting theory, and as a political scientist with a mathematical background sufficient for him to recognize that he could benefit considerably from working closely with a real mathematician, Dan had for some time set himself the task of persuading Moshé to join him in research. Some details of what would become perhaps the most productive research partnership in the field of voting theory are provided in Rudolf Fara’s interview with Dan and Moshé that appears in the Festschrift volume described below. Dan recalled: “My efforts were finally successful when… I told Moshé about an article that I had recently read—one about the saw-tooth function phenomenon of what was called ‘the quorum paradox’.” Moshé recalled that the quorum paradox “turned out to be a simple problem in finite combinatorics and probability, and I could solve it quite easily. There is nothing a mathematician likes better than solving a problem in a field other than his or her own. So I was very pleased that I was able to help. This got me hooked, and we started to collaborate. It made a very welcome change in my research work, and I owe this productive turn entirely to Danny.” (Dan published the resulting paper on “Averting the Quorum Paradox” in Behavioral Science in 1991, crediting Moshé’s assistance.) As Dan further recalled, “This was the beginning of a wonderful and fruitful collaboration; the rest is history.” Their first joint paper, “After Two Centuries, Should Condorcet’s Voting Procedure Be Implemented?,” was published in 1992—also in Behavioral Science. They would go on to coauthor a major treatise and a prodigious number of top-class papers on the subject of voting power.

At the time Dan and Moshé began their collaboration, the two major voting power indices, due to Shapley and Shubik and to Banzhaf, were generally regarded as approximately equivalent variants of the same concept. However, Dan and Moshé showed in their first joint paper on voting power (“Postulates and Paradoxes of Relative Voting Power: A Critical Re-appraisal,” Theory and Decision, 1995) that the former satisfied several appealing postulates while the latter, along with other less standard indices, did not; accordingly, they concluded that Shapley-Shubik was the only reasonable index of a priori voting power. But a follow-up paper written with William Zwicker (“The Bicameral Postulates and Indices of a Priori Voting Power,” Theory and Decision, 1998) showed that Shapley-Shubik failed another plausible postulate which Banzhaf satisfied. Thus both major indices seemed to have major failings. This conundrum led them to wonder whether “our original, vague idea of unspecified ‘voting power’ conceals more than one precise idea, because there is more than one type of voting power. The history of science knows many instances of intuitive notions that, when subjected to rigorous explication and analysis, yielded two or more precise notions that had previously been conflated with each other.” This inquiry led them to the distinction between “power as a voter’s expected share in a fixed purse to be distributed among the voters (P-power), and power as a voter’s a priori ability to influence decisions arrived at by voting (I-power).” The Shapley-Shubik index, explicitly derived from cooperative game theory, is a measure of P-power; when summed over all members of the voting body necessarily adds up to one (or some other constant representing the value of the fixed purse). In contrast, the Banzhaf approach is implicitly probabilistic in nature and when formalized becomes a measure of I-power—specifically, given that everyone votes as if flipping fair coins, the Banzhaf power of a voter is the probability that the outcome turns on how he or she votes. As such, this absolute Banzhaf measure does not sum to one (or any other constant), though it can be transformed into the (less informative) relativized Banzhaf index that does sum to one.

Dan and Moshé’s magnum opus, The Measurement of Voting Power: Theory and Practice, Problems and Paradoxes published by Edward Elgar in 1998, further developed these insights and thereby provided the first “systematic critical examination and exposition of the foundations and methodological presuppositions of the theory of a priori voting power” that had been previewed in their paper with Zwicker. Along the way, they observed that Banzhaf’s implicitly probabilistic ideas had been anticipated by the explicitly probabilistic work of Lionel Penrose almost two decades earlier and that James Coleman, while evidently unaware of either Penrose or Banzhaf, had incisively critiqued the Shapley-Shubik index as a conceptually inappropriate measure of I-power—without, of course, using that term. (Dan and Moshé set out this intellectual history more fully in “Voting Power Measurement: A Story of Misreinvention” published in Social Choice and Welfare in 2005.) In addition to the foundational theoretical chapters, their book includes two empirical chapters: one dealing with court cases in the US flowing out of Baker v. Carr pertaining to whether weighted legislative voting could be a remedy for malapportionment of legislative districts, and the other examining weighted voting in EU institutions, particularly the Council of Ministers.

Much more could be said about this seminal work but suffice it to say that it will maintain a dominant place in the subject for generations to come. Here is a selection of snippets taken from a few of the many enthusiastic reviews: “To say that this book is excellent would be an under-statement. It is really remarkable” (Maurice Salles); “This book pulls no punches in exposing confusions in the orthodox approach to voting power. Its clarity and good sense point the way to a better founded theory…” (Ken Binmore); “It is at the cutting edge of research in the theory and measurement of a priori voting power, but it is also of practical and political relevance…” (Matthias Sutter).

In their interview with Fara, Dan and Moshé described how the duo conducted their long-distance research, with Dan in Jerusalem and Moshé in London.

Fara and Machover had founded the Voting Power and Procedures (VPP) program at the London School of Economics in 2000 with the objective of exploiting pedagogical media expertise to bring voting power and related issues to a wider audience including politicians and their advisers, journalists, academics and their students, and interested laypersons. Dan soon joined the program (along with Dennis Leech and Maurice Salles), and Dan and Moshé swung into action immediately, producing a non-technical primer on the voting challenges created by the proposed enlargement of the EU to be negotiated in the Treaty of Nice in 2001. This provided the basis for VPP’s successful application for funding from the Leverhulme Trust for further development of the field of the measurement of voting power, with a particular focus on the system of qualified majority voting in the EU Council of Ministers, an issue that gained further salience with the further EU enlargement in 2004. As well as coauthoring with Moshé some two dozen published articles and many more reports available on the VPP website, Dan contributed immensely to the twice-yearly round of VPP-sponsored public lectures and to its annual workshops, symposia, and conferences held variously in the UK, France, and Germany.

In 2007, the Leverhulme Trust approved funding for a further research initiative on voting power in practice that would emphasize practical applications of voting theory and intense interactivity between practitioners and theorists from various disciplines in the field. Dan took to this project with great enthusiasm, starting with a workshop on a posteriori, or actual, voting power, and the problems of ‘one person, one vote’ and gerrymandering. Although Dan continued to keep abreast of developments in the field of voting power, his attention shifted back to his earlier research area of voting procedures and their susceptibility to various problems and paradoxes.

In 2009, Dan proposed a workshop to focus on two objectives: (1) to try to reach a consensus regarding the relative degree of severity which may be attributed to the main paradoxes afflicting voting procedures designed to elect one candidate out of three or more; and (2) to try to formulate necessary and/or sufficient conditions for the occurrence of the main paradoxes under each susceptible procedure. Dan’s detailed outline was presented as a working paper at a VPP symposium held at the LSE in May 2010 and then at the workshop itself held at the Chateau Du Baffy in Normandy, France, in the summer of 2010. The final version appeared as a 70-page chapter in Dan and Moshé’s edited collection of papers presented at the workshop, Electoral Systems: Paradoxes, Assumptions, and Procedures published by Springer in 2012. It would be fair to say that Dan was disappointed that the workshop failed to achieve his two objectives, but this setback spurred him on to further efforts.

Since this area of research was of less interest to Moshé, Dan began to publish papers with other coauthors—notably, Nicolaus Tideman and Hannu Nurmi—on Condorcet conditions and the monotonicity paradoxes that afflict certain procedures. These papers appeared in Public Choice, Theory and Decision, Mathematical Social Science, and Group Decision and Negotiation. Dan’s research partnership with Hannu Nurmi of the University of Turku in Finland, who had also published extensively on voting procedures and paradoxes, was especially productive. Together they authored three mini-volumes: Monotonicity Failures Afflicting Procedures for Electing a Single Candidate in 2017, Voting Procedures for Electing a Single Candidate in 2018, and Voting Procedures under a Restricted Domain in 2019, all in the SpringerBriefs in Economics series. Together they substantially fulfilled Dan’s wish to examine and categorize the main voting procedures and determine their susceptibility to the various paradoxes.

In March 2011, a symposium was held at the LSE that celebrated Dan and Moshé’s enormous contributions to voting theory. Many of the papers presented were included in the Festschrift volume Voting Power and Procedures edited by Rudolf Fara, Dennis Leech, and Maurice Salles and published by Springer in 2014, which also included Fara’s interview with Dan and Moshé from which we have quoted. To Fara’s final question, Dan’s response is poignant in its prescience, and yet hopeful: “As to my own academic plans at age 75, I think I can use more productively whatever limited skills I still have by engaging in disseminating some of the knowledge regarding voting power and procedures that has already been accumulated than in creating new knowledge. Therefore I, together with Moshé, the editors of this volume and some additional colleagues, are now engaged in developing a novel multi-level pedagogical program, which we tentatively call VoteDemocracy. This, it seems to me, will be my last venture.”

From the beginning, the VPP program aimed to develop a course on voting theory, exploiting audio-visual media for wide international dissemination. During a visit to London with Ilana in November 2011, Dan convened several informal meetings that developed initial thoughts for a syllabus, for a course textbook, and for teaching modules. It was roughly agreed that it would be a full year undergraduate course for credit, suitable as an elective or as a core constituent to a degree program in a number of disciplines. Dan’s enthusiasm and energy for the VoteDemocracy course were inspirational. He and Moshé submitted the first module, a comprehensive unit on voting power. Until the very end of his life, while also collaborating with Hannu Nurmi on their books on voting procedures and paradoxes, he was in frequent correspondence with the other coeditors of the projected VoteDemocracy textbook — Rudolf Fara, Nicholas Miller, Friedrich Pukelsheim, and Maurice Salles—writing additional explanatory appendices and suggesting features to be highlighted, and so on. Fara recalls that his penultimate conversation with Dan, within a month of his death, explored the importance of voter participation and its relationship to political representation. For Dan, in voting, the key to achieving genuinely representative democracy was synonymous with the problem of making the correct social choice, obvious and yet elusive. Dan’s most important gift to the project was his ever hopeful and unflagging optimism concerning how voter education could contribute to a fairer and more just society. This could lead ultimately to more truly representative democracy; and this, he thought, was necessary if democracy is to survive.

Dan had many interests beyond his academic work. His wife Ilana and daughter Noorit have provided some reminiscences.

Although very much engrossed in his academic work, Dan was not a single-minded, single-subject person. He had wide interests outside his field of study. He was extremely knowledgeable in history and geography and was an avid reader of biographies and stories about great voyagers. He was also very fond of art, never missing an opportunity to visit an exhibition, Rembrandt being his favorite painter, and the impressionists his favorite school—a somewhat conservative taste in art. From Ilana he caught “the theater bug” and while visiting London, which they often did, they tried to catch a play a day, sometimes going to the extreme of two plays a day.

The birth of his first grandson, 25 years ago, and the six following, brought great joy into Dan’s life. He adored them and was never too busy to spend time with them and instruct them methodically in different subjects, from types of elections to all kinds of natural disasters. Grandson Yotam claims that he was the first child in kindergarten that knew what ‘tsunami’ means.

When Dan retired in 2003, he indeed stopped teaching but went on with his research and publications. Having more free time helped him to initiate new projects and invest in collaborations with colleagues from all over the world. He went on working, even when he was diagnosed with lung problems and connected to an oxygen generator.

We conclude by quoting from a memorial note (translated from Hebrew) by Dan’s former student and long-time colleague Abraham Diskin that appeared in Yisrael HaYom (Israel Today) a few days after Dan’s death: “Dan was not just an intellectual and a scholar but also a meticulous and fair person, generous and modest, a loyal friend and an exemplary family man. Dan had a virtue for which he sometimes paid dearly: he was a person whose mouth and heart were equal. He did not hide his opinion, even if what he had to say enraged the other side. A man of honesty and integrity, sense and sensibility. A person who pointed, all his life at the elusiveness of justice, was a compass of yearning for truth and justice. The heart aches for his loss, but the compass we inherited from him will accompany us forever.”

— Rudolph Fara, London School of Economics

— Nicholas R. Miller, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Oddbjørn Knutsen

Oddbjørn Knutsen, professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, died quite unexpectedly from a heart attack in August 2019 at the age of 66. He passed away in the midst of an active academic life with research, teaching and just ahead of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference in Wrocław, Poland, where he had been the organizer of the academic program.

Oddbjørn was born in Nordland county not far from the birthplace of the two towering figures in Norwegian political science, Stein Rokkan and Henry Valen. His research was very much influenced by the cleavage approach to electoral research as introduced by Rokkan, and he shared with both the drive to make Norwegian research part the international scholarly community. The title of his 1985 PhD thesis signals a research program that guided his work throughout his career: Political Values, Cleavages and Ideology: The Norwegian Political Culture in Comparative Perspective.

Oddbjørn graduated from the University of Oslo in 1979 and worked first with various projects under the Norwegian Research Council and the Department of Political Science (1980–86) before he became a researcher and research director at the Institute for Applied Social Research (INAS) in Oslo. Here he developed a lasting interest in the Nordic welfare model. He returned to the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo in 1992 and became a full professor in 1993.

Oddbjørn was a productive researcher and was actively involved in international research collaboration. He played a significant role in the developments of the research fields focusing on political values, cleavages, and political systems in established democracies. An early example is his participation in the research series “Beliefs in Government,” where he contributed to three chapters in the 1995 work The Impact of Values: “On Materialist Value Orientations,” “On Party Choice” and “Cleavage Politics.” Looking at his research publications the titles are peppered with terms like “materialist and post-materialist values,” “old and new politics,” “value orientations,” “social cleavages,” “regional cleavages,” “social structure,” “belief systems,” “left-right orientations,”“class voting,” and the like. But most importantly, many include the phrase “a comparative study.” This was a central component in all of Oddbjørn’s research, namely his belief that in order to make progress in political science, comparisons were necessary. He was of course conscious of the challenges—e.g., the lack of comparable data and the differences in contextual setting making “the same” variables different. He based most of his research on the large international survey databanks, and he worked meticulously with empirical issues like question formulations, data collection, and method as well as the theoretical issues of classification and conceptualization. Comparisons, he believed, should be both possible and meaningful across countries.

His impressive effort as well as his ability to master these challenges are demonstrated in his two main books: Class Voting in Western Europe: A Comparative Longitudinal Study (Lexington, 2006), and Social Structure, Value Orientation and Party Choice in Western Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). In the latter, he used data from 18 West ern European countries represented in the European Values Study (EVS). Here he finds that class and religion are still the main determinants of party voting, although there are large changes in how the classes vote. He also finds that “the modern gender gap” is especially strong in the Nordic countries with men leaning toward the radical right while women to a larger degree favor the green parties. Another recent publication is the book he edited, The Nordic Models in Political Science: Challenged, but Still Viable (Fagbokforlaget, 2017). Still, the main legacy of his scientific work is the numerous articles in high-ranked international journals and contributions to landmark anthologies.

Oddbjørn’s professional contributions to the University of Oslo as well as to the Norwegian, Nordic and international political science milieu are significant. For many years, he organized the “comparative politics” section for teaching at the department and he is remembered as a well-prepared, systematic teacher—always willing to share his notes and thoughts with students. He was a driving force in running the Oslo Summer School in Comparative Social Science from 1995 to 2018. Here he recruited internationally merited political scientists to teach doctoral students from all over Europe. He was also elected chairman of the Norwegian and the Nordic Political Science Associations for many years.

His international network and participation in comparative research also led him to active participation at numerous APSA and ECPR conferences. Oddbjørn was leader of the ECPR standing group on public opinion and voting behavior in a comparative perspective (2008–2015). He was member of the research council at the European University Institute in Firenze (2015–2019), and he served as head of the local organizing team for the ECPR’s highly successful General Conference in Oslo in 2017. Oddbjørn became member of the ECPR executive committee in 2018. Here he was chair of the events subcommittee with overarching responsibility for ECPR events. Oddbjørn was also a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

We have lost a good colleague and a scholar that contributed significantly to the comparative political science community as well as to our knowledge about crucial political developments in mature democracies. His early death is a loss to all who knew him as well as to the political science community.

— Knut Heidar, University of Oslo

— Ottar Hellevik, University of Oslo

— Anne Julie Semb, University of Oslo

Gerhard (Jerry) Loewenberg

Gerhard (Jerry) Loewenberg died in Iowa City on December 28, 2019. The loss of this great scholar, mentor, and friend will be felt widely throughout the academic community and entire political science profession.

Jerry, who held the University of Iowa Foundation Distinguished Professorship, joined The University of Iowa Department of Political Science faculty in 1970. He served a term as department chair and also served as the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences from 1984 to 1992. Prior to arriving at Iowa, he was a professor, as well as department chair and acting dean, at Mount Holyoke College from 1953 to 1970. His commitment to excellence in teaching, scholarship, service, and mentorship in his 50-year association with the University of Iowa made him an unparalleled contributor to the university and to the discipline of political science. Perhaps more importantly, his personal integrity, kindness, and optimism inspired scores of colleagues, hundreds of graduate students, and thousands of undergraduates.

Jerry was a world-renowned expert in the field of legislative studies, endlessly fascinated by the puzzles of decisionmaking the field presents. A leading authority on the German Bundestag and legislative politics more generally, he was one of the first scholars to study this institution and published numerous books and articles in the most prestigious political science journals. Jerry also served as co-chair of the East-West Parliamentary Practice Project (EWPPP), an organization that seeks to strengthen parliaments in countries undergoing democratic, political, social, and economic transition. He remained active well after he formally retired, and his research is still read and cited by legislative scholars. Jerry’s scholarly achievements led him to be elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.

Perhaps Jerry’s most enduring scholarly contribution is the foundational role that he played in creating the field of legislative studies, with a particular emphasis on the study of the causes and consequences of different legislative procedures across countries. He was one of the founders and original editors of Legislative Studies Quarterly, which is now the preeminent journal in legislative studies. He was an important contributor to the journal’s current prominence and served as one of its editors for a remarkable thirty years.

Jerry’s role in creating the field of legislative studies is part of a broader pattern of service. He devoted a lifetime of service to the discipline of political science, including holding many leadership roles in professional associations and related organizations. He was honored by the American Political Science Association in 2001 when he was awarded the Frank J. Goodnow Award for Distinguished Service, an award given to scholars who have made “outstanding contributions to both the development of the political science profession and the building of the American Political Science Association.”

As impressive as they are, Jerry’s scholarship and service provide only a partial measure of his influence and contributions. He was also a dynamic undergraduate and graduate teacher, winning the University of Iowa’s highest award for teaching, the Hancher-Finkbine Medallion. Well into his 70s, past the age at which many faculty have retired, Jerry continued to teach the large introductory course on comparative politics as well as upper-level courses on European politics. His love for teaching about politics was recognized by his students, who admired him for his enthusiasm, his knowledge, his intellect, and above all for his evident care and support for them. Later in his life he brought this passion to a new audience, teaching about a wide variety of political topics at the Iowa City Senior Center.

Jerry similarly influenced decades of graduate students at Iowa. He attracted many graduate students to the university and made it one of the top departments in the world to study legislative politics. After returning to the department from his stint as a dean, Jerry stepped right back into working with graduate students, coauthoring several journal articles with them and introducing them to the world of academic publishing. More than that, Jerry provided an unending source of support for graduate students. Some of this support was formal, such as serving on dissertation committees, where he was simultaneously a tough critic and a compassionate and kind mentor. But his support for graduate students extended well beyond this formal role. He was always available to students, willing to offer professional advice, lend his insights to their work, help them navigate graduate school and the academic job market, and provide them with perspective given his decades of experience. It’s no surprise that one Iowa PhD, when she was nominated for a teaching award and asked to identify her teaching and mentoring philosophy, remarked that she was tempted to simply write: “Be like Jerry Loewenberg.”

Faculty members, like undergraduate and graduate students, benefitted immensely from Jerry’s presence. In particular, he was unfailingly welcoming and supportive of faculty members in the early stages of their academic careers. He was a source of wisdom about professional matters, providing countless insights about teaching and working with graduate students, and generally made sure new faculty members knew his door was open to them, whatever they wanted to discuss. Furthermore, he provided this support not just to his immediate colleagues, but to political scientists across the nation and around the world. We know of countless political scientists who can point to moments when Jerry helped them, be it through a note of encouragement, comments on a paper, support for a new initiative, or advice on a thorny problem. It’s hard to imagine a better, or more gracious, role model.

Jerry continued his support for faculty and students when he was dean of the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. During his time as dean, he oversaw broad changes to the college and used his knowledge of legislatures to create a faculty assembly in the college, giving faculty a greater voice in college governance.

Jerry had a transformational and lasting influence on both the field of political science and on the University of Iowa. He was a once-in-a-generation scholar, mentor, administrator, teacher, and friend. Former colleagues and students across the nation and around the world mourn his death. But we all feel grateful to have known such a person: someone who combined outstanding scholarly and administrative abilities with humility, who worked constantly to better the lives of others, and who was known widely for his enduring optimism, warmth, humor, and wisdom.

— Brian Lai, University of Iowa

— Rene Rocha, University of Iowa

— Chuck Shipan, University of Michigan

—Tracy Slagter, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh

—Pev Squire, University of Missouri

—Mickie Wiegand, University of Iowa

with special thanks to Ina Loewenberg, Tracy Osborn, Tom Rice, and Christine Bricker

John Peterson

A global community of students, colleagues, friends, and family mourn the untimely passing of John Peterson, professor of politics at the University of Edinburgh, in May of 2019. John was born in Vermont, a state he kept close to his heart (along with the Boston Red Sox) despite a lifetime spent living and working far from New England. He received his undergraduate BSc from Ithaca College in New York, an MA in politics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his PhD from the London School of Economics. His time in California included a stint as a successful radio ‘disc jockey,’ one who never forgot the day he met Dolly Parton. His radio experience left him with a life-long love of music, and the ability to do scholarly presentations with an energy and cadence that set him apart.

John was an inspiration both inside and outside the classroom. He held teaching positions at the Universities of Essex, York, and Glasgow, before joining the Department of Politics and International Relations in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh in 2005. At Edinburgh, he was pivotal in building politics and IR into a leading hub for research and teaching—establishing new forms of outreach such as the Transatlantic Seminar series, which facilitated key conversations on US, UK, and European politics.

John had a remarkable ability to connect across borders and cultures, and so enthusiastically embraced his many visiting academic posts at think tanks like the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels and the Center for Transatlantic Relations in Washington, as well as the University of Vienna, the University of California, Berkeley, Sciences Po in Paris, University College Dublin, the University of Agder, and the College of Europe at Bruges.

The range of scholarship John leaves us with is truly impressive. His earliest publications focused on the evolution of European technology policy, examining how the European community pioneered the promotion of pre-competitive research in areas like biotechnology, an important precursor to the relaunching of the community in the 1980s. From these beginnings, John broadened his research agenda to governance and policymaking in the European Union (EU), starting with a series of important articles exploring the emergence of network governance at the European level, and continuing with an important and influential framework for the study of EU decision-making.

Here John developed a special partnership with his wife, Elizabeth Bomberg. Together they wrote major contributions examining the role subnational actors and the influence of policy transfer in the EU, culminating in their joint monograph, Decision-Making in the European Union (Palgrave, 1999) and their popular textbook, The European Union: How Does it Work?, now in its fifth edition (Oxford University Press, 2018). John was a leading scholar on the institutions of the EU, publishing seminal works on the changing role of the European Commission, and coediting the leading text on the subject, The Institutions of the European Union (Oxford University Press, 4th edition, 2017).

John’s work also made major contributions to our understanding of the EU’s role in the world, including its relationship with the United States, beginning with his seminal 1996 book, Europe and America: The Prospects for Partnership, and continuing in a series of books and articles that charted the changing course of US/EU relations over more than two decades. More recently, with his long-time colleague and coauthor Alasdair Young, he wrote a series of important works on the EU’s role in global trade, including Parochial Global Europe (Oxford University Press, 2014). These were areas where John helped to shape the public debate, arguing for a strong European voice in the management of globalization and the shaping of the transatlantic relationship.

John’s service to the field and profession was fundamental. He was coeditor of The Journal of Common Market Studies with Iain Begg during much of the 1990s, spearheading its rebranding as JCMS once the European Union was launched. During his editorship, JCMS published many of the seminal articles that sought to understand both the revival of the European integration process and the wave of crises in the years following the Maastricht Treaty. More recently, he also served as an active and dynamic editor in chief of the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, and at the time of his death, was likewise creatively invigorating that journal. John was also a tireless force behind multiple British, European, American, and global academic networks such as the University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES), the Political Studies Association (PSA), the European Union Studies Association (EUSA) and the International Studies Association (ISA).

John Peterson had many professional accomplishments, but it was his generosity of spirit and his exuberant humanity that set him apart from most of us. There was a truly extraordinary outpouring of tributes from all manner of people on social media when his passing became known, and many of his former students and colleagues found themselves emailing each other to share their sadness, but also stories about him and expressions of their gratefulness to have had John in their lives. He was and is an inspiration to many, and will be sorely missed.

John is survived by his wife Elizabeth Bomberg, who is professor of environmental politics at the University of Edinburgh, and his two sons, Miles and Calum. A special fund in John’s memory has been set up at the University of Edinburgh to support a range of studentships in politics and international relations, particularly for students from underrepresented backgrounds. Donations to the John Peterson Memorial Fund can be made at: https://donate.ed.ac.uk/portal/public/donate/donate.aspx?destination=JohnPetersonMemorial.

— Erik Jones, Johns Hopkins University

— Kathleen R. McNamara, Georgetown University

— Mark Pollack, Temple University

Robert Scigliano

On October 14, 2019, Robert Scigliano, distinguished scholar of the American republic and its founders, dedicated teacher to a dozen generations of political science students, and my father, died in his sleep with his four children gathered round at an assisted-living residence in Concord, New Hampshire. He’d seen 94 very full years of life.

His last days passed peacefully; he woke just once, with a wide-eyed expression of wonder, then slept again. The months leading up to this were less tranquil. Confinement wore hard on someone as proudly independent as our father. He cherished not only his autonomy but a deeper independence of mind. As many of his colleagues and past students have noted in the kind remembrances they’ve sent us, he was always open to, even avid for, fresh and contrary arguments, as long as they were real arguments and not ideological recitations. “The gentleness of his presentation,” says Charles Rubin, now at Duquesne University, “went hand in hand with fair-mindedness. All sides of a question got respectful and thorough treatment.”

He had no patience with cant of any stripe. He called himself a conservative, and in many ways he was. But he saw labor unions, civil rights and environmental protections, and affirmative action as just and necessary. Decades before Facebook and Amazon, he deeply distrusted modern technology’s effects on society and harbored no illusions about capitalism’s selfish, monopolistic instincts.

My father first broke with his familial Democratic roots in 1968, when he saw the party and country sliding toward chaos. But he crossed back to vote twice for Bill Clinton and for Barack Obama. He most certainly followed his own judgment in these choices and in every other, but he also had an uncanny sense of how political winds blew and ballots would break. He won the electoral betting pools in each university department he joined. In October 2016, when the polls and pundits favored president-in-waiting Hillary Clinton, my father declared, “Well, I guess Trump’s got it sewn up.” I thought it was dementia talking. I should have known better.

He and I first parted political ways when I marched against the war in Vietnam and helped organize a protest at my high school. As the years went on we wrestled endlessly over other issues, from criminal justice, the courts, and drug prohibition to the nature of the social contract and whether it existed at all. But believing that one should see, as well as hear, every side of an argument, he took me to see the great 1967 anti-war march in New York when I was 14 and we were visiting there. A year or two later he took my brother and me to a be-in led by Timothy Leary in a packed, smoke-filled gymnasium at the University of Buffalo. He planted a pointed question or two but did not lecture or deplore what we saw; he left us to make up our own minds.

He maintained a nuanced support of the war effort, deeply informed but perhaps skewed by his special experience in Vietnam. In 1957, he signed on as assistant to the director of the Michigan State University Group, an experiment in gown-and-government cooperation that would soon attract controversy. Under John Hannah, its visionary and expansionist president and a former US assistant secretary of defense, MSU contracted to provide nation-building services, ranging from training and arming police to advising on civil codes, records systems, and land reform, to the infant Republic of [South] Vietnam. But the MSU Group bore the seed of its own dissolution: a CIA contingent planted there under academic cover. Word inevitably got out, and legitimate researchers out in the field became potential targets. With the project’s director away on a stateside visit, it fell upon my father, then 33 years old, to tell the CIA it had to leave.

Three years later, he and his MSU colleague Guy Fox were the first to publicly disclose Michigan State’s entanglement with the CIA in a measured but critical review of the project subsequently published by Praeger. This helped fuel a sensational 1966 exposé in Ramparts magazine—hardly an outcome he sought or anticipated.

Even earlier, in 1960, he became the first to defy a clause in MSU’s contract stipulating that group members would not publish anything reflecting badly on the Saigon regime—a clear violation of academic freedom. In an article in Pacific Affairs, he chronicled how it had co-opted, subverted, or suppressed opponents, maintaining “‘showcase parties,’ as alleged proof that Vietnam is a democracy” while turning it into “for all practical purposes a one-party state.” He noted that President Ngô Ðình Diêm mistook for Communist activity what “may be no more than plain opposition,” and that in its “attempts to control Communism,” his regime “made use of quasi-Communist techniques.” While conceding that “political liberty must necessarily be circumscribed” in a nation threatened with attack and subversion, my father suggested that “less control of the press, a greater role for the National Assembly, and greater tolerance of the public expression of opposition viewpoints” could strengthen rather than weaken the state.

This article drew Diêm’s ire and opened the gates to further criticism. Despite MSUG leaders’ pleas on behalf of academic freedom, he declined to renew the project’s contract. My father nevertheless returned to Saigon in 1961 for further research, then published a comprehensive volume on the country’s political, social and economic situation, South Vietnam: Nation Under Stress. He had to draft a quick afterword when, just before it was to be printed, Diêm was overthrown and killed with US complicity. A call came with the news as we sat at the dinner table.

For us kids, Vietnam was a tropical idyll, and my father also deeply admired the country, if not its leadership. When we stopped in Italy, the land of his ancestors, on our round-the-world way home, he noted how dirty Rome seemed after the clean-swept streets of Saigon. Back in Michigan and then in Buffalo, friends from Vietnam would occasionally visit and stay, perhaps as they took refuge in this country. When, in 1997, I took him back to visit what was now Ho Chi Minh City for the first time, he delighted once again in daily life there and marveled at seeing far fewer police on the street than in the old days.

But he did not further write on nor as far I know ever teach about Vietnam. I don’t know if he was saddened or disenchanted by events there, or just interested in other matters. I suspect however that the experience helped fuel his interest in the long presidential/congressional contention over the war power, which he investigated deeply and illuminated freshly. He never wrote a book on the war power but perhaps should have; one critic scored others who did write books for not noting how Scigliano, in brief articles, had already gone where they did, and farther.

That scholarship was part of the immersion in the roots of American government, the checking and balancing of its three branches, and the making and meaning of the Constitution that came to define his career. His colleagues and students can describe and judge his work much better than I, who saw it in glimpses amid our wide-ranging conversations on many other topics. His fascination with and love for the American system were infectious—even for a Canadian like Roderick Williams, who came to Boston College to study political philosophy but, as he recounts, “knew next to nothing about American government, politics, and political thought and had little interest to find out more. My time with professor Scigliano changed that. As his student as well as his teaching assistant, I began to cultivate what has become a life-long interest in American political matters of all kinds”—and a likewise lasting friendship.

“When I came to BC in the mid-1970s I had the not-uncommon prejudice of ‘the 60s’ that there was nothing serious about the discipline of American Politics and nothing good about the practice,” Charles Rubin recounts. “I hope I can be forgiven for saying that in my earliest years in the program, serving as a TA, I saw little reason to revise that prejudice. But I say that only to cast in appropriate light the great impact that Mr. Scigliano’s courses had on me, particularly his course on the founding. It was in its own way a revelation. Madison’s debates were so brilliantly and compellingly presented—the personalities, the politics, and principles all artfully and thoughtfully woven together. How could a country with such a founding not be more lovable than I thought?”

Devotion to the American constitutional system did not mean blind, blanket endorsement. When Williams asked him whether it was better than Britain’s (and Canada’s) parliamentary system, “his short answer was ‘it depends.’ That was the truth of it, as each had strengths and weaknesses; there was the question of context, too, the social, historical, and political.” As on every issue, all sides must be considered, and all facts respected.

That meant following the facts whatever one thought of the outcome. His work showed how big an impact arcane scholarship could have in the real world. In 1984 the State of New York enlisted my father and his BC colleague Robert Faulkner as expert witnesses in a case that bid to radically redraw the state’s map. The Oneida Indian Nation had sued to reclaim a swath of land stretching from the St. Lawrence River to the Pennsylvania border, arguing that the state had exceeded its constitutional authority in the two treaties that transferred the land in the 1780s. The state had won in trial court, and the Oneidas won on appeal. Then, as Faulkner tells it, Scigliano, “alone among a plethora of activists, historians, lawyers, state attorneys, consultants, etc., discovered the key: A crucial statement by Jefferson as to limited state power applied to the new Constitution, not the Articles of Confederation under which the treaties were made. His finding was decisive; New York had to win. So the district court decided, and so the appellate court approved.”

This judiciousness and breadth of mind extended even to the great rivalry between Hamilton and Jefferson that so animated both the republic’s founding and my father’s study of it. Every student and colleague soon came to appreciate what Carol McNamara, now at Arizona State University, calls “his love of everything Alexander Hamilton”—a passion dating back to a day when Hamilton was more widely seen as a crafty capitalist tool than a visionary statesman and patriot. On the phone or at the dinner table, he would break out with an apposite Hamilton anecdote the way other people talked about television shows.

“At the time he did not much like Jefferson (I had never heard of such a thing!),” says Rubin. “But even that dislike was not so strong that it could survive a sabbatical [at the university Jefferson built] in Virginia. On that point he came back a changed man, although I seem to remember he always denied it.”

In fact, I think my father was nearly as fascinated by Jefferson as by Hamilton. However dangerous he thought Jefferson’s (and, via Jefferson, Rousseau’s) political notions, he appreciated the Sage of Monticello’s brilliance and breadth. He even shared two of Jefferson’s passions, for natural history and all things French. I don’t know that he ever incorporated Darwin’s theories of natural selection and human descent into his lectures, but he read and reread Darwin (and not just On the Origin of Species). Ever the classicist, he took little interest in later writings on evolution and ecology: why bother when there was so much to learn from Darwin, accompanied by the chatter of the birds at feeders outside the window?

Le professeur Scigliano began polishing his high school French in Vietnam, and continued studying and savoring French language and culture for the rest of his life—in France whenever he could get there. His knowledge of vocabulary and grammar became formidable, and he even taught in Paris, in French, during one sabbatical. But he always lamented that he could not shed the accent, acquired from his non-native high school teachers, that gave him away as American.

Montesquieu, whom he read as he did other authors in French, was certainly vital to his study of political theory. But the authors he seemed to relish and quote most were Molière and la Rochefoucauld; their sardonic puncturing of vanity and hypocrisy, together with the bittersweet plaints of Edith Piaf, afforded consolation for humankind’s frail and wicked ways. Aside from Piaf and a few musicals—“My Fair Lady,” “Kiss Me Kate”—the music on the family turntable tended to be classical, in particular Mozart and Beethoven, plus Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy.” In later years my father would sing to himself the ballads of his youth. He took some amused interest in the Beatles but mostly scorned the popular music that came afterward.

Shakespeare offered similar consolation, and he shared that passion with us. Every so often he would pull out a play and enlist us in reading a scene. When I was at most 12 years old he took me to see my first play, King Lear (we also learned early on to swim in the deep end of the pool). I felt like an initiate in a new and wondrous world, one in which he was very much at home. Among his unpublished writings is an ingenious essay arguing that the real villain, and playmaster, of Hamlet is Hamlet’s so-called friend Horatio, who nudges everyone else to his or her doom and then, the last one standing, stands ready to take the reins of power himself.

My father loved not just Shakespeare but poetry generally, especially the great English and Irish poets of the 19th and early 20th centuries—Browning, Arnold, Yeats and, as leavening, Lewis Carroll. In merry moments he might burst into “The Walrus and the Carpenter”; at more pensive times, long before it became a standby of political pundits, he recited “The Second Coming.” When he visited me, he would seek out a volume of verse each night for bedtime reading. He shared the love of poetry with Rod Williams’s wife, Lopa, a librarian at Boston College. “Lopa introduced him to William Carlos Williams’s poem called ‘The Red Wheelbarrow,’” Rod recalls, “and both were fond of Wallace Stevens. At Lopa’s request, Robert read John Masefield’s poem called ‘On Growing Old’ at her father’s funeral. Beautifully done.”

He loved painting as well, the Impressionists especially, plus Gauguin, van Gogh and—for a change of sensibility—Botticelli. Even in his last years, when his attention span otherwise flagged, he could spend all day in a museum, intently studying each canvas in turn. He lamented how he had wanted to draw but found he had no gift for art (or for music).

Not that it was all high culture all the time; our father’s energy and enthusiasm flowed much farther. He loved watching sport—football, especially in Doug Flutie’s heyday at Boston College, and, above all, Red Sox baseball. He fondly recalled Ted Williams’s haughty, defiant attitude as well as his great hitting. He enjoyed playing even more than watching—especially matching himself against much younger players on the handball court. To ensure a steady flow of opponents, he taught generations of grad students and TAs to endure searing smacks on the palm, then battled them with an intensity startling to those who knew only his patient, diffident classroom manner. “There, some claimed, he would do anything—breaching truth and fairness—in order to win,” his longtime BC colleague and friend Robert Faulkner recalls. “When a student got really good, they complained, he would look to introduce some novice to the game so he could resume his winning ways.”

Dad likewise competed fiercely at poker (with colleagues and at multi-generational family Christmas gatherings), hearts (on family vacations), and cribbage, a legacy of his shipboard days. He was an avid sailor until one summer in Maine, when I rented a double kayak and took him and my mother in turn out to paddle. Within a year or two he had bought two single kayaks and one double, and the sailboat started gathering cobwebs. He also kept swimming through his eighties—slowly but surely, back and forth, whether across a Maine quarry or along a Caribbean beach, long after the rest of us had gotten chilled or had enough.

His canniness at poker reflected his family background, as I suspect his identification with the scrappy young immigrant Alexander Hamilton partly did. My father wasn’t an immigrant himself, but the conditions of his upbringing scarcely forecast a top academic career. He was born in Boston’s North End, a teeming district of tenements and Italian immigrants, to Edward and Alma (née Mazzei) Scigliano. His father died young, leaving his mother with three young children. She married a widowed plumber named Patrick (P. F.) Russo who lived up the street and had four young daughters of his own. They soon had four more, one of whom died in childhood. Their house was so crowded, young Robert and his older brother were consigned to the screened porch. Perhaps that’s where he got the habit of sleeping with a window open, even in winter.

Somehow Nana kept the 11 kids fed, in school, and, in her mischievous younger son’s case, out of juvenile detention. Long after the nest had emptied, he and I made a game of trying to find a time, day or night, when we could stop by without her having the equivalent of a full dinner spread out in minutes, while telling us we were wasting away to skin and bones. We never found a time.

P. F. was a gentle and kindly man, though with his gruff voice, fireplug frame, ever-present stogie, and face like a map of Campagna he looked as though he’d stepped off a Godfather set. He grew tomatoes and grapes in steel barrels in the alley, pressed the grapes in the basement, and shared the resulting wine with the guys from the neighborhood—the paesani, everyone called them—who flocked to “the club” atop the old stable that housed P. F.’s shop. In winter they watched football, played poker, and placed bets with the numbers runner who stopped by. In summer they played bocce in the court P. F. built behind the shop.

Nevertheless, my father and, as far as I know, his siblings learned no Italian; their parents reserved that language for private conversations. P. F. hoped my father would take over the business, but never complained when he showed no interest in plumbing.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, my father and a friend, then 16, lied about their ages and tried to enlist in the Marines. Caught out, he waited till he was 17, then left school and joined the Navy. He served from 1942–46 on minesweepers in the North Atlantic and destroyers in the Pacific, with a stint in between in officer candidate school at Harvard. (He deliberately flunked out; he did not want to be an officer any more than he would have wanted to chair a department later in life.)

After the war, he washed up in California and enrolled at Compton Junior College under the GI Bill. There he revealed a thirst for knowledge that would carry him to bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science at UCLA, where he and our mother met (and, he would recall while she rolled her eyes, he brought along a book about the Soviet economy on their first date). He earned his PhD at the University of Chicago, studying under the constitutional scholar Herman Pritchett and the political philosopher Leo Strauss. I never heard him call himself a Straussian or political philosopher, but he was very much a philosopher, rather than a quantitative “scientist,” in temperament and inspiration, and was deeply influenced by Strauss’s close attention to textual subtleties and the classical roots of thought.

The newly minted Professor Scigliano spent 13 years at Michigan State, including three in Vietnam, and four at SUNY Buffalo. He then returned to his beloved hometown for a 31-year career at Boston College, where he helped build a respected political science department. “It took courage to depart an established university at Buffalo to join a fledgling program at a then-struggling BC,” says Faulkner. “This, to be with a gathering whose intellectual seriousness he respected... Robert Scigliano was about as far from a careerist as a serious man can be.”

Proud though we knew him to be in private, his aversion to careerist jockeying and horn-blowing—what Faulkner calls his “almost shy and certainly contained” manner—was legendary. Any royalties from his books went to wine-and-cheese parties for students and colleagues, ensuring that commercial considerations did not taint his scholarly efforts.

His eccentricities were likewise the stuff of legend. We of course saw many more of them: traveling in Europe, he would dress every bit the proper professor, in a tweed jacket and wingtips—and an ear-flapped, safety-orange L.L. Bean hunter’s cap. After reading about the frequency of head injuries in auto accidents, he wore a bicycle helmet in the car. When he finally realized that lactose intolerance lay behind his persistent digestive troubles (after neglecting my brother Brian’s warning on that score many years earlier), he became an anti-dairy zealot, lecturing all who would listen on the evils of milk. He even took to using orange juice rather than milk in the pancakes with which he regaled breakfast guests. Some enjoyed them.

Above all there was what Faulkner calls his “endearing professorial absent-mindedness.” Sometimes “he turned up for class wearing two ties, one over the other. Or arrived but without his lecture notes. Or there was the time when he sought a key for his office from the secretary, because he had locked his in his car, and then ten minutes later sought a second, because he locked the first in his office.”

Such lapses only highlighted his prodigious recall of less mundane subjects. “I always admired and envied him for his good mind, which continued to surprise me by its quickness and wide range,” says Wayne Ambler, another former student. “He showed his quickness in many ways, minor ones, such as calculating the odds at the poker table, and more important ones, such as in the classroom, where we could never catch him off-guard. Even when he forgot to bring his notes to class... he stayed cool and managed to present organized and profound reflections on the topic of the day.”

“If you’re absent-minded, they won’t notice when you go senile,” our father used to joke. That excuse will only carry you so far, even with a companion as conscientious and grounded as our mother there to pick up the pieces. But for all his chagrin over lost wallets and passports, I wonder if his forgetfulness wasn’t somehow strategic—a way of reserving mental space for the things he cared more about.

Ultimately, what mattered most was not scholarship, dedicated though he was in pursuit of it, but teaching. Not the mind of Madison or Hamilton, but the young minds he sought to cultivate, sharpen and encourage.

In 2000, shortly before he retired from Boston College, he enjoyed a sort of scholarly valediction, even apotheosis, when he edited a new Modern Library edition of The Federalist and resolved longstanding questions about the authorship of some of the essays. But when Brian Lamb interviewed him about the project on C-SPAN’s Booknotes, it was teaching that he spoke most passionately about. “Why do you teach?,” Lamb asked. “To touch souls,” he replied, “the closest thing to being in a priesthood.”

And students were touched. “He was a great teacher and a wonderful mentor for me, and especially for [my husband] Peter,” Carol McNamara, now at Arizona State University, recalls. “The best line ever while Peter was writing his thesis occurred on a chapter about Hamilton Peter received back from Scigliano, who wrote in the margin that reading Peter’s chapter, he realized that Hamilton was even better than he thought.”

“He truly changed the course of my life,” says Stephen Knott, now at the US Naval War College, who went on to dedicate a book to him.

It’s ironic then that none of his four children followed him into academe, though we’ve all achieved some measure of professional success and public service. In my case at least (I’m the oldest), this was a source of dismay, as I only learned later at second hand; he would never say such a thing, believing as he (and my mother) did that everyone must follow her or his own path. Being Robert and June Scigliano’s progenies, we did just that.

But I used to joke that I didn’t need to gather degrees or study writing or political science; growing up in Scigliano’s Academy—sinking and swimming in the dinner-table debates, receiving the gentle, almost subliminal reading suggestions and timely gifts of books—was just as good.

Now those debates and shared readings are over, and we miss them and so much more than we can say.

— Eric Scigliano

Thomas Phillip Wolf

The world lost an admirable teacher, administrator, scholar, and communicator when Thomas Phillip Wolf died on October 1, 2019 at age 86. Tom spent almost a half century as a faculty member, primarily at Indiana University, Southeast, and the University of New Mexico, fully engaged in the various dimensions of academic life.

Tom was an old school guy. Born in Kansas, he was a high school cross-country track and wrestling star. After he spent a year at Wichita State, the Korean War broke out. He joined the US Marine Corps in 1951 and served 11 months of combat duty in the Korean War, rising in rank from private to sergeant. Into the twenty-first century, he still sported a sticker on his car bumper, “I remember Korea.” In 1953, he married his best friend’s sister, Ellie. This 61-year relationship ended only with her death in 2014. They raised three children. After working for Beech Aircraft, he returned to Wichita State. He was attracted to the natural sciences, but a required course on political science had a lifelong impact in steering his career path. Later as a teacher, he sometimes wore a white lab coat to class to emphasize the scientific basis of the discipline. After graduating with a BA in 1959, he won a Woodrow Wilson fellowship for graduate work at Stanford. Achieving an MA (1961) and a PhD (1967), he accepted an appointment at the University of New Mexico in 1963.

Tom’s scholarly interests were in comparative politics generally, especially political leadership, British and Japanese politics, and aspects of American politics, including the presidency, political parties, public opinion, and interest groups. One of his summer hobbies was to tour US presidential memorials. Tom began publishing scholarly works in the 1960s, and for several years contributed on New Mexico topics in books and journals, notably the Western Political Quarterly’s annual edition on elections in Western states. Later, much of his work in various journals and books was on comparative politics. Spending much of his career at a small undergraduate institution, Tom was called upon to be a generalist, and his research in journals and books followed this pattern.

In 1970, he had the opportunity to move to Indiana University, Southeast. For the next 29 years he served in several capacities there, including associate and full professor, chair of social sciences, and later dean of the school. He “retired” in 1999 but continued to teach courses part-time at IUS and other campuses in the region. An article on him in the Louisville Courier-Journal (July 13, 2000) was entitled, “Professor emeritus still loves profession: Retired IUS dean still making time for his students.”

Tom participated in a variety of professional organizations, including the APSA, the MPSA, the Indiana Academy of Social Sciences, and others. But probably his favorite was the British Politics Group. Tom’s interest in Britain was quickened in 1983 when he attended all of the annual party conferences in that country and met Jorgen Rasmussen, then executive secretary of the BPG. When I succeeded Rasmussen as executive secretary in 1994, I appointed Tom as editor of the BPG Newsletter (later BPG Quarterly), in that early internet age an important mode of communication between developments in the UK and the BPG’s worldwide—especially US-based—membership. Tom took up the job with alacrity, and, with the aid of his administrative assistant Brigitte Adams, produced a substantial printed publication for years, eventually transitioning into the digital age. Tom was a meticulous but patient editor and wrote much of the copy himself, including book reviews, which he loved to do. At that time Tom’s role in the BPG, especially his work with the Newsletter/Quarterly, was key to keeping the organization cohesive.

Tom Wolf was an affable, soft-spoken, and compassionate man who worked well with others. He was one of those people who contribute to an organization in many quiet ways but always with enthusiasm and a cooperative spirit. We can use more like him.

— Donley T. Studlar, West Virginia University and East Tennessee State University

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