Quite unexpectedly and tragically, our coeditor, Robert Alford, died of pancreatic cancer on February 14, 2003, at the age of 74. We would like to tell you a little bit about him. Bob grew up near the Sierras in California where his parents had a ranch in Avery near Angels Camp, of jumping-frog-contest fame. Bob was well over six feet tall and he loved to walk in the forest, orchards, and mountains. He graduated from Bret Harte High School in the gold country of Northern California and attended the University of California at Berkeley in 1946. He was president of Stiles' Hall and active in the campus YMCA and the Labor Youth League. He regularly played classical piano in the Berkeley Chamber Music Group and loved folk music. Bob began work on an MA in sociology at California during the days of the controversial Loyalty Oath and left the university in 1951 rather than sign.

In 1952, Bob started working at the International Harvester truck plant in Emeryville, California. Bob Blauner, who was a coworker, describes their first meeting. “He was wearing goggles to protect his eyes and a gray apron or smock over his work clothes to collect the metallic dust coming from the machine he was operating” that made fenders for diesel trucks. Bob served as a shop steward and, with Blauner and others, pushed the UAW further to the left than it might otherwise have gone.

Political parties have long been the subject of opposing assessments. From a negative perspective, parties are criticized because they promote conflict and dissension. Lord Bolingbroke (1965), writing in the 1730s, saw parties as deserving suppression, to be replaced by a leader who could supply the moral authority to promote national unity. On the eve of World War I, perhaps viewing himself as such a leader, Kaiser Wilhem II announced that he no longer recognized parties, only Germans. In much less extreme fashion, James Madison's distaste for parties went along with a recognition that they were inevitable and hence needed to be controlled.

All the U.S. Founding Fathers, who, perhaps understandably, were uncomfortable with the kinds of rudimentary parties with which they were familiar, shared Madison's concerns in some form. It took another eighteenth-century Englishman, Edmond Burke, to recognize the value of parties when, removed from a milieu of paralyzing conflict, they could operate as civil competitors (Mansfield, 1965). At the birth of the United States, despite the ill-feeling toward political parties, the Founding Fathers soon found parties necessary to govern and, later, to peacefully transfer power (Hofstadter, 1972:viii).

It was not until the early twentieth century that political theorists began to give parties a central role in guaranteeing democratic government. In one such assessment, James Bryce (1921:119) wrote that, “parties are inevitable. No free large country has been without them. No one has shown how representative government could be worked without them.”

Although modern political sociology has existed for more than a century, it came into its own during the decades bridging the victory at the end of World War II and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Especially important in setting the direction for political research with a distinctive focus on “the social bases of politics” was Seymour Martin Lipset's Political Man (1960), published in twenty countries and deemed a “citation classic” by the Social Science Citation Index. The transformative potentials of the social bases of politics were redirected away from the pluralist theoretical tradition by William G. Domhoff's Who Rules America? (1967), which stimulated interest in capitalist power; William Gamson's The Strategy of Social Protest (1975), which expanded attention to the popular bases of power beyond interest groups to social movements; and James Petras and Maurice Zeitlin's Latin America: Reform or Revolution (1967), which excited new interest in the politics of labor movements. The 1980s' ascent of state-centric institutionalism registered a major impact on political sociology with its Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (1985). The works of these times had a common focus on the societal determination of political processes and outcomes and on how state structures cause varied outcomes in different countries.