When I was asked by the European Political Science editorial team to write a short biographical note in memory of Hans Daalder (1928–2016), I confess that I was both honoured and apprehensive. How could I reject the opportunity to praise the seminal work of one of the founding fathers of European Political Science? At the same time, I was concerned by the enormity of this task, since I had only met him on one brief occasion and never worked directly with him or under his supervision. Rather, I am just one of the many European comparativists who owe much of their way of studying and understanding politics to the writings and teachings of this outstanding academic. Moreover, had Peter Mair, not left us prematurely, he would most certainly be writing these words in memory of his mentor.
At a personal level, I became acquainted with Daalder’s work during my first degree at Aberdeen University in 1991, thanks to the comparative political analysis course taught by Derek Urwin. Both drew their insights on politics through the lenses of historical institutionalism. I was particularly influenced by his account of the way party systems had evolved hand-in-hand with state formation and the role played by parties as agencies of territorial integration or disintegration.
It would be another two decades before I actually had the opportunity to meet Hans Daalder during the 2009 European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Joint Sessions Workshops in Lisbon. His wife, Anneke Daalder-Neukircher, had recently passed away (2007). You cannot tell a man’s personality from first encounters, but details are revealing. Professor Daalder carried with him a photo of his life-long companion that he immediately put on top of his bedside table at the hotel. He told me that he always travelled with that photo. This episode is revealing of Daalder’s personality: he was regarded by his closest colleagues and friends as a courteous and generous man, with an unmatched life experience, intellectual rigour and foresight and humbly committed to developing the next generation of scholars and supporting his peers.
Professionally, Daalder always struck me as a man of good sense, a social liberal thinker, an academic that loved the detail of entrenched history (what he termed “the traumatic memory of past conflicts”) and individual motivations (“leadership styles”) without loosing sight of the broader picture. Diversity and variance had no solo meaning, but had to be understood comparatively. Not comparatively in the sense of ‘cross-nationalist’, but case-oriented, analysing historical patterns of institutional development and concrete and in-depth knowledge about key actors and processes.
Daalder, as many leading comparativists of his generation, was primarily concerned with big questions – such as state formation and nation-building in Europe, democratisation, party system formation and transformation, cabinet organisation and reform, etc. – rather than establishing generalised relationships between variables across a large N; he was far more focused on understanding the complexity of political units than on methodological tidiness and statistical manipulation of data (Mair, 2011; Della Porta, Reference Della Porta, Della Porta and Keating2008).
Daalder’s approach to comparative analysis had been shaped by both the political developments and the methodological revolutions taking place in the late 1920s. As he put it, ‘I was born in 1928, reason enough to make one turn to the discipline of political science’ (Daalder, 2011). Like Charles Merrian before his time, he believed political science needed to strike a balance between new and traditional approaches and should not fall into the temptation of methodological monotony: the development of databases and their statistical treatment was the key to scientific knowledge, but statistical analysis does not lend in itself to the understanding of social and political facts.
He was not resistant to methodological innovation and the tendency towards quantitative political analysis and predictability models. On the contrary, not only was he an advocate for change, but he also played a central role in making European Political Science more professional and internationalised. Daalder was one of the eight founders of the ECPR in 1970 and followed its first Chairman, Stein Rokkan, as Chairman from 1976 to 1979, as well as continuing to serve as its Director until 1988 Indeed, such was his commitment to nurturing the next generation of political scientists was reflected that the ECPR created the Hans Daalder Prize which is awarded biennially for an outstanding paper at the ECPR Graduate Student Conference. Such was Daalder’s standing in the profession that he was a natural appointment as the first Head of the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the newly established European University Institute in Florence, Italy, where he initiated an American-style PhD training programme, which is still a distinctive mark in this prestigious institution.
As an academic, Daalder remained true to his core beliefs and was not easily impressed by trends, expressing some concern about the way political science was evolving, particularly in Europe. Daalder summarised this very elegantly during his address at the Joint Sessions of the European Consortium of Political Research on 19 April 1979: political science has become more professional, ‘[y]et, our gain in professionalism may have been made at the expense of the general character of our educational, programme. Do we offer enough understanding about historical factors which determine our polities? Do we cover the range of present-day political systems well enough? Do we equip new generations with a sufficient knowledge of other disciplines, so as to make them at least know why these could be relevant in specific instances?’ (Daalder, 1984).
His words of caution remain as relevant today as they were then, in particular at a time when the tools to assess individual merit evaluation methods are also another challenge to the development of political science: Is the publish or perish approach the best way to improve scientific productivity? Are we improving the quality of our research or are we running the risk of de-investment in certain areas – people start working in those areas and using those methods and approaches that are likely to improve their chances of publishing in top journals of the discipline thus relegating certain topics and approaches to a secondary plan – and segmentation – leading to the creation of closed communities and niche journals with higher impact factors?
Daalder reflected intensively about these developments and rejected this global trend: ‘the modern belief that publications in refereed journals (themselves ranked in importance), “count” more in research assessments and are regarded as more important than chapters in books, not to speak of books themselves. This may be true of some of the sciences, but remains a highly dubious, and definitely one-sided, measurement when applied to our discipline’ (Daalder, 2011).
This should serve as a word of caution to the younger generations of political scientists, in particular those who have senior responsibilities in shaping the future of political science in their own higher education institutions. Daalder would have certainly embraced a more professionalised and internationalised political science, but this cannot be achieved by reducing the little room available for more exploratory and sometimes speculative academic work.
