Learning About Politics in Time and Space: A MemoirRichard RoseProfessor Richard Rose has been teargassed in Chicago, seen walls go up in Belfast and come down in Berlin. His education in the streets and in the corridors of political power give him a unique perspective on discrimination by race, religion and class, and the world in which political scientists live today.In his gripping memoir, Rose distils a 500-page book into a three-minute Oval Office explanation to George W Bush of why America’s intervention in Iraq was a disaster. He gives practical advice to political scientists about how to make words into concepts and communicate what you know to others inside and outside universities. The book’s photographs show memorials to the dead, and living evidence of how election forecasting has changed since Delphi.

One man, two continents, six decades – a life on the

front line of political science

Richard Rose is Professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde, and Visiting Professor at the European University Institute, Florence. He has acted as consultant to global organisations including the World Bank, UNDP and the OECD. His work has been translated into 17 languages and Samizdat, and he has contributed widely to print and television media. He has been awarded seven lifetime achievement honours in countries across the world.

ISBN 9781907301476November 2013Paperback, 210pp

In his outstanding six-decade career, Richard Rose has written 40 books about comparative politics and public policy.Rose’s broad knowledge – gained from working as a newspaper reporter and from his experiences in the corridors of power – allows him to combine the bottom-up perspective of the ordinary citizen with the views of presidents and prime ministers.Through the context of memoir, Learning About Politics in Time and Space also shows how political science developed from a passionate but amateur pursuit of knowledge into the professional discipline it is today.

Buy this book today for just £12! Visit www.ecpr.eu/ecprpress

Political Science Matters

Learning About Politics in Time and Space

Richard Rose

University of Strathclyde Glasgow

Only Connect E. M. Forster, Howards End

Contents

List of Photographs viii

Introduction

Reflections From Experience 9A Memoir 11; The Perspective of the Author 14

SOCIALIZATION OF A SOCIAL SCIENTIST

Chapter 1: The Roots of a Political Scientist 21Growing Up in a Border City 22; Learning in Spite of School 26; Learning from the Library and from the Streets 28

Chapter 2: Discovering Learning 33An Old-Fashioned University Education 34; Exploring Europe 38; My Education as a Reporter 40

Chapter 3: The Education of Amateur Political Scientists 47Before the Transformation 48; Manchester Made Me 57; Committed Political Sociologists 60

Chapter 4: The Professionalization of Political Science 65The Expansion of Universities Nationally 66; Training Students: The Strathclyde Approach 68; Institutionalizing Professional Links Across Europe 74

EXPERIENCING HISTORY FORWARDS

Chapter 5: England Then and Now 81Learning About Class 82; Class Parties? 84; From England to Scotland 89

Chapter 6: America Then and Now 95Free at Last 96; Washington: A Small Town Now Global in Impact 101

Chapter 7: Northern Ireland: Nothing Civil About Civil War 107A Warm Welcome From All Sides 109; Guns Come Out 111; Governing Without the Rule of Law 115; What an Outsider Did 118

Chapter 8: Fallout From the Berlin Wall 125The Reality Behind the Wall 126; Free to Choose 128; Russians and Russia 133; What I Did 136

LEARNING TO COMPARE

Chapter 9: Concepts Are More Than Words 145Naming What You Observe 146; In the Field 151; Conversing Through Questionnaires 154

Chapter 10: Communicating What You Know 159Writing as a Discipline 160; Form Follows Function 166; What Would You Tell the President About Iraq in Three Minutes? 171

Chapter 11: Public Policy and Political Science 175Disciplined Research and Undisciplined Problems 176; Creating a Problem-Focussed Centre 179; Distinctive Tools 181; Impact Long Term 185; L’envoi 189

References 191

Brief Curriculum Vitae 199

Index 205

List of Photographs

Six intellectual companions i

President Harry S. Truman 15

St. Louis old and new 25

An old-fashioned professor 35

Götterdämmerung in Vienna 41

Slide rules rule 55

A shepherd to graduate studentst 73

Victorious 1959 Conservative Cabinet 86

Killed in the struggle for civil rights 98

Governing without consensus 113

A choice between the ballot or the bullet 117

Berliners killed seeking freedom 129

Happiness at the Berlin Wall 130

Classical election forecasting 155

Relaxing on day two of an election 167

An Oval Office exchange 172

Courtyard of the Reform Club 186

Introduction

Reflections From Experience

Everyone is supposed to be able to write one interesting book: the story of his or her own life. This implies that for the past half century I have been writing more than 40 books that are uninteresting because they are impersonal. Social scientists are expected to emulate natural scientists, setting aside personal experiences rooted in a particular time and place, and concentrating on timeless and universally applicable phenomena. Yet the sociology of knowledge emphasizes that what we write reflects who we are and what, if anything, we have experienced outside as well as inside the walls of academe. In practice, much of the best political science is written by people who combine a broad experience of life, a passion about what they do, and a willingness to take intellectual risks (see Munck and Snyder 2007: 3).

History imposed a broad experience of life on anyone like myself, born in 1933, the year that Adolf Hitler and Franklin D. Roosevelt each came to power. My first political memory is listening to a radio broadcast of Hitler accepting the surrender of France by Marshal Pétain in June, 1940. I was fortunate in being American, and thus having an ocean between my home and Europe’s battleground. That saved me from the scourge of an occupying army demonstrating that even if you are not interested in politics, it is interested in you. Before I was old enough to vote, I was on a boat to experience Europe. Since then research has led me to experience what politics is about in places as different as England and Russia, Western and Eastern Europe and the United States.

I have always been passionate about writing. Initially, the question was: What to write about? At the age of eight I taught myself to type in order to write about baseball. The newspapers that reported baseball games also reported politics, which in those days was more than a game. I wanted to become a reporter on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a Pulitzer-Prize winning newspaper in the city in which I was born. In 1955 I succeeded in doing so. But after two years I decided to combine my passion for writing with my passion for study by getting a PhD. Since then I have written many books and articles about dozens of countries and given talks in 45 countries on six continents.

Because I care about what governments do and do not do, I have spent more than 60 years writing about politics as it exists in the streets as well as in books. I did not learn about racial and religious discrimination from being taught about democracy in school but from living with it in my youth. I did not learn about the importance of freedom from political theorists but by talking to people who had suffered or fled from Nazi and Communist dictatorships. I have been tear-gassed by police at the 1968 Democratic Party convention and a year later at the Bogside Rising in Londonderry. Seeing the gun re-enter Northern Ireland politics when researching there, I put a proposal to act to a Labour minister. She said with surprise, ‘Why Richard, you care’. I was surprised that she did not seem to care.

10 Learning About Politics in Time and Space

I have taken many risks in seeking knowledge from life as well as from books, but at the time choices were made they did not seem risky. My career has developed by doing what I felt right to do at the time. In the belief that studying politics as well as literature would improve my work as a reporter, I became a postgraduate researcher in international relations at the London School of Economics in 1953 although I had never taken a class in international relations. After a year I dropped out to return to St. Louis to work as a newspaper reporter. However, I soon realised that I had too much or too little education, and quit to go to Oxford to get a doctorate. I stuck with the decision to look for an academic job after being turned down for post-doctoral fellowships at Oxford and the LSE. A month after my student grant had run out, with no job and my wife pregnant with our second child, I was offered a job at the University of Manchester. When universities expanded all over Europe and my contemporaries were taking chairs in the South of England, I chose to become a professor in Scotland in 1966. When offered a chair at MIT a few years later, I turned down the opportunity to leave Europe for the United States. The choices I have made have not been calculated career moves; each was made in hopes it would further my education.

People who have heard me tell anecdotes about my experiences of places, people and times have suggested that I collect them in a book. This memoir is my response. Unlike an autobiography, a memoir is an extroverted book; the object is to characterize what has been observed as well as the observer. Evoking events from the past is a reminder that countries not only differ from each other today but also that every country differs from what it was when I started travelling more than 60 years ago. I can remember what places such as Oxford, Mississippi and Oxford, England were like when they were wrapped in their pasts. Comparing past and present emphasizes the truth in the maxim: the past is another country.

In accumulating the experiences encountered here I had the advantage of becoming involved in politics when politicians were more accessible. Leading politicians were accustomed to talking to other people without being protected by handlers. When I wrote to former prime minister Clement Attlee requesting an interview for my doctoral thesis, he replied in his own writing. Television cameras and YouTube had not yet intruded in what were then private discussions. Very few doctoral theses were written on contemporary (that is, 1950s) politics. Experience as a newspaper reporter taught me where to look for information, how to get access to policymakers who knew things I wanted to find out and how to establish empathy with the people you are talking to. Enjoying the visibility of a bylined Fleet Street journalist and a television election expert gave me a status among policymakers independent of that conferred by a PhD. This explains why much of what follows is set in the corridors of power or in streets where the rubber, that is, government, hits the road, that is, citizens.

Reflections From Experience 11

A Memoir

This book is written for people curious about politics, people and places. Reflecting my long life and varied times, each chapter offers a different mixture of the three. As a sequel to my book What Is Europe? (Rose 1996), the opening chapters give an explanation of what sort of European I am. Chapters about universities refer to institutions that professors and students know today, but few experienced what they were like before the transformation of academic life began in the 1960s. Instead of offering readers an impersonal discussion of social science methods, chapters present my own approach to turning words and numbers into ideas for articles and books. With careful attention to words and examples, both statistical and anecdotal, it is possible to communicate to all kinds of audiences from undergraduates to an Oval Office incumbent. The style is inspired by Sir Philip Sidney, who emphasized In Defence of Poesie that writing can both inform and entertain.

Socialization of a Social Scientist

In geographical terms, almost all of my adult life has been lived in Europe but my mind naturally travels across national borders or continents almost hourly. My roots, described in Chapter 1, are in the border state of Missouri, a slave state held in the Union during the American Civil War. However, in its chief city, St. Louis, there was a sense of Kultur reflecting the enlightened influence of 1848 German immigrants, including my father’s family. Cleavages of race, religion and ethnicity were evident and accepted. This gave me a good grounding in applied sociology. My schooling had disadvantages and advantages. Almost all the teachers had attended teacher-training colleges rather than having an academic education. This left me with lots of free time to educate myself. I could explore the streets of a big city and listen to jazz in bars and to Bach in more formal settings. I began learning about the world outside St. Louis by prowling the stacks of a well stocked public library.

Of the three places where I initially sought to further my education, only Johns Hopkins in Baltimore was a university in the deepest sense of that term. It was founded on the German model in 1876. This gave it a Central European vision of humanistic scholarship that attempted ‘to reconstruct the civilization which had been in disarray since 1914’ (Donnelly 1978: 137). I made the most of its library and of the streets of Baltimore and took my degree in comparative literature and drama in two years. In the year following at the London School of Economics, I learned about British politics by going to political meetings and about English society by talking to people who gave me lifts when I hitchhiked around the country. I explored European cities and countries that no one in my family had ever seen. Then it was back to St. Louis to continue my education as a newspaper reporter. I learned to get information by telephone, by knocking on doors, and by interviewing all kinds of people from policemen to the poet W. H. Auden.

The founders of modern political science in Europe were necessarily amateurs, for they could not be trained in a subject that did not then exist. I was the youngest and most amateurish among the group described in Chapter 3. When I was at the

12 Learning About Politics in Time and Space

LSE there was engagement with politics but not political science. Oxford was almost seven centuries old when I entered and the professor of modern history could be an expert on the 13th century. There was suspicion and even denial of the idea of social science. It was only after I was appointed a lecturer in government at Manchester University that I found myself in a political science department. It shared intellectual interests with the small band of political sociologists led by Stein Rokkan and Marty Lipset. I happily threw in my lot with them.

The explosive expansion of universities in Europe in the 1960s removed traditional academic barriers to change and made possible the institutionalization of political science as a profession. At the age of 33 I gained a chair at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Chapter 4 sets out the programme of training that I developed while head of department there. The foresight of Stein Rokkan, the energy of Jean Blondel, and the generous confidence of the Ford Foundation made possible the founding of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) in 1970. However, decades of effort were still required to create what we have today. When the ECPR first met, there were only eight of us in the room.

Experiencing history forwards

History viewed forwards is much less predictable than history in retrospect. The starting point of each chapter in the second section of this book shows a world very different from what we now know; it was unclear what the future would bring to places such as England under rationing, to Eastern Europe under Stalinist control or a Germany that ten years earlier had been governed by Nazis. Such uncertainties were not due to a lack of theoretical understanding by social scientists; they reflected the consequences of the Second World War.

England as it was when I arrived in 1953 still bore marks of Queen Victoria’s reign. The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, had been born in 1874, the leader of the Opposition in 1883, and people could be put in their class as soon as they spoke. When I read the expurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover I took it as an excellent novel about relations between classes. The prosecutor who sought to ban publication of the unexpurgated edition agreed; he asked the jury: ‘Is this a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’ (Rolph 1961: 17). My experience of the transformation of England is recounted in Chapter 5. Over half a century political change has been reflected in successive editions of a book of mine that first appeared with the title of Politics in England in 1964 but in the 2014 edition is called Politics in Britain.

I made for Washington, only an hour by train from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, at the end of my first month at university and happily walked its streets. I still go to Washington now that I live 3,000 miles away. My interest in jazz made me very conscious of race. Chapter 6 records how I practised desegregation by following musicians and the changes that I have witnessed since first visiting the Deep South in 1953. It also records the changes I have witnessed in Washington. Working as a freelance British journalist I covered presidential nominating conventions from Lyndon Johnson to Jimmy Carter. Working as a professor, I have written books

Reflections From Experience 13

about the presidency and introduced the comparative study of presidents and prime ministers to an academic field that had remained parochial while national leaders were going global. Washington has changed from being a small Southern town to a city global in impact, its politics remains true to Congressmen Tip O’Neill’s dictum, ‘All politics is local’; the locale is the world inside the Washington beltway.

My academic friends thought it odd to study Northern Ireland in the mid-1960s, because nothing was happening there. But that was the point: I wanted to learn how a political system created in the aftermath of civil war could persist when it was supported by a Protestant British majority and rejected by a Catholic Irish minority who wanted to be part of the Republic of Ireland. No sooner had I completed an ambitious survey of public opinion there than civil rights marches began to disrupt the status quo. By the time my book on Governing Without Consensus was published in 1971, the killing had started in a three-sided civil war. Friends now thought it odd that I continued to research while thousands of people were being killed. Chapter 7 explains why the term civil war is a great misnomer and spells out my experience of politics when it became deadly.

As a byproduct of being on committees of the International Political Science Association, in the 1970s and 1980s I visited many countries in the Soviet bloc. I had no illusions about how its citizens were subjugated. When the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev demonstrated that a seemingly powerful ruler can miscalculate, I was in residence at a West Berlin think tank. The fall of the Berlin Wall was a great challenge to social scientists to learn how ordinary people responded to the collapse of institutions that, like them or not, were integral to how they lived. In 1991 I launched the New Europe Barometer, nationwide sample surveys that systematically collected data about how people coped with the transformation of their polity, economy and society. Since then, more than 100 Barometer surveys have been conducted in 17 countries, some now in the European Union and others in a more or less post-Communist state. Fortunately, the questions I asked made sense both to political scientists and to the people who were interviewed. The experience of researching post-Communist countries at political ground zero is recounted in Chapter 8.

Learning to compare

Anglo-American comparison starts for me at the breakfast table, for my wife, Rosemary, is English. I have always sought to go outside this comfortable but narrow world to study un-American and un-British countries. In the course of time I have done fieldwork and published on many countries across Europe from Ireland and Portugal to Turkey and from the United States to Colombia, Korea and Japan. The third section of this book not only discusses issues central to seminars on the comparative method, but also things that are not taught there, such as how to find the black market up the Amazon and how to tell the President of the United States that he is following a policy in Iraq that is doomed to fail.

The more experience you have, the more necessary concepts are to categorize what is seen. Just as abstract concepts such as Gothic and Renaissance enable

14 Learning About Politics in Time and Space

architectural historians to compare buildings, so we need concepts to turn anecdotes into data and transform what is observed into what is meaningful. Chapter 9 emphasizes a basic logical rule: We must name things before we can count them. Whereas learning to understand the society in which you are born usually occurs unthinkingly, comparative research requires soaking up knowledge of foreign countries and poking around unfamiliar cities and talking to people who live there. Years of going to the theatre have trained me to watch how people behave and what they say and to reflect on what I see and hear. This helps write questions that make sense to the people asked them in surveys of public opinion, as well as to those who want to extract conceptual meaning from what they say.

Up to a point, writing is a discipline: graduate students learn the rudiments of making a PowerPoint as I once learned the rudiments of drumming. Making a PowerPoint ‘sing’ requires both application and inspiration. After 70 years of writing, I still have to write each article and book line by line. I do not care for free form jazz or prose. I start by thinking about the theme and title before I write the first line of text. Since writing involves communication, one first has to find the right voice for a given audience. In Chapter 10 I draw on the experience of writing everything from television scripts to University press books to suggest how writing skills can be cultivated and how it is possible to communicate an idea in three minutes to a president as well as in 300 pages to an academic audience.

The concluding chapter is about the difference between the study of politics and of political science and how I try to be an intellectual arbitrageur combining the two. I founded the Centre for the Study of Public Policy (CSPP) at Strathclyde in 1976 to relate the undisciplined problems that politicians find in their in-trays to the problems that academics find in books. Like medicine, public policy can be scientific in searching for evidence and diagnosing a problem through cause-and-effect analysis. Whether its prescriptions will work is even more uncertain than in medicine. In addition, there are also conflicting views about what constitutes good health in the body politic. In my public policy work I have developed distinctive social science tools for analysing the growth of government and learning lessons from other countries. I have also learned that your ideas about the future consequences of current political activities can be politically unwelcome and take decades or longer to have an impact.

The Perspective of the Author

In the course of my career, I have drawn inspiration from two fellow Missourians, Mark Twain and T. S. Eliot. Twain’s Huckleberry Finn rejected the idea that he should conform to conventions by going to school and wearing shoes. Instead, he explored the frontiers of knowledge in America’s then Wild West. T. S. Eliot left St. Louis in the opposite direction, embracing the civilizations of Europe. However, this embrace was not uncritical. His writings also reflected the injunction of his Idaho-born mentor, Ezra Pound, to ‘make it new’.

The political views that I hold are in the tradition of nineteenth-century liberalism in which the first freedom is freedom from the state (Berlin 1958). I

Reflections From Experience 15

have known enough refugees from authoritarian and totalitarian political regimes not to take freedom for granted. My commitment to liberty and law led me to join the American Civil Liberties Union when Senator Joseph McCarthy was riding high and to have a continuing concern with abuses of the rule of law in the United States and the United Kingdom. Reading Reinhold Niebuhr re-enforced what I had learned from tragic dramatists, namely, that moral men and immoral societies can and do co-exist. Governments can ‘miss the mark’ or, as in the case of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, hit the wrong mark. My political preferences are disciplined by the belief that social scientists should try to understand parties that win elections, whether or not they would vote for them. The judgments embedded in the chapters that follow will make clear that, to quote Winston Churchill, there are also some things up with which I will not put.

Signed photo of a Missouri Democrat, Harry Truman, before he became a statesman. Sent to myself as a Truman Democrat

16 Learning About Politics in Time and Space

My initial party identification bespeaks my time and place; it is that of a Truman Democrat. Like Abraham Lincoln, Harry Truman was a self-educated farmer. Instead of looking charismatic, he looked and talked like people I could see any day on the streets of St. Louis. The only presidential vote I ever cast was for Adlai Stevenson in 1956. I would not have voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960 because the position he and his brother held on McCarthyism was the opposite of a profile in courage. Moreover, even in the White House he sought to avoid addressing the challenge of desegregation, a challenge that Lyndon Johnson understood and accepted.

While I have views on political issues, I find it difficult to imagine that there would ever be a political party that would consistently agree with me or that I would want to join. I have friends in all parties and none: the godfather of one of our children is a former Labour parliamentary candidate and of another was a leading figure in the Conservative Research Department. Although I am a European by residence and choice, my citizenship remains American. I appreciate the benefits that the European Union has brought to Europeans, myself included, but am ineligible to vote in the election of the European Parliament. After writing a book about how EU institutions do and do not represent Europeans (Rose 2013), I feel no more deprived of a voice in Brussels than the average European citizen and, through the access that my expertise has earned, probably have more voice there.

This memoir is not a straight-line narrative, because my life has not conformed to a plan mapped out in youth. It started as a trial-and-error search for something that would challenge my abilities and it continues to take novel turns in response to fresh thoughts and opportunities. In consequence, my list of publications covers fields that are normally kept apart by the boundaries of social science disciplines today. A Google search of ‘Richard Rose’ can be confusing. It yields some 188,000,000 results that refer to a number of Richard Roses, including a dead California mystic and a second-division English football player. Searching ‘Richard Rose politics’ reduces the number to 71,000,000 in which I appear in a variety of guises: Rose the writer on parties and elections, Rose the Russianist, Rose the author of studies in medical sociology, Rose the Northern Ireland scholar, and so forth. The diversity of my interests led to my absence from a Japanese introduction to political science with chapters that presented the big idea of a number of Western political scientists. The author assigned to write the chapter about me could not reduce what I wrote to a single theme.

As is customary in a memoir, the chapters that follow are organised topically rather than chronologically. Since many readers will not be familiar with the full course of my career, in the appendix there is a short curriculum vitae. A website, www.profrose.eu, has bits of journalism written when events discussed herein were happening; other materials not easily fitted into the text; and some photographs. Details of citations in the text are given in references at the end of the book. A full list of my academic publications is given as part of the lengthy CV on the website. While this is hardly my first book, it is a first in another sense: it is the first in which the only table is the table of contents!

Reflections From Experience 17

Multi-cultural references reflect the way that I think and talk. Since no reader of this memoir could share all my experiences, this should make the book more interesting. I have tried to provide enough information in the text so that a reader not familiar with an allusion to Charles Gomillion or to Ernest Bevin can turn to Google for details. This avoids interrupting the flow of the narrative with detailed descriptions of what will be familiar to some if not all readers. Given the autobiographical nature of a memoir, I have followed the Dictionary of National Biography practice of drawing on private knowledge as well as on what is in print. A retentive memory for a revealing remark is the source of many quotations in this book. In addition, I have a set of pocket diaries that summarily record where I have been since 1953 and what I have written since and sometimes earlier.

An academic inevitably learns from those who have gone before. When starting my career, I was fortunate in becoming friends with many giants whose shoulders were broad. A number are pictured in the frontispiece of this book. I have also funded a doctoral dissertation prize at the European University Institute, Florence, in the name of Juan Linz and Stein Rokkan to reward the doctoral thesis that best exemplifies their broad and deep scholarship. I have learned too from people who have had to endure the effects of politics gone wrong in America’s Deep South, Northern Ireland, Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Michael Goldsmith, Karen Howes, Edward C. Page, Toby Sanchez and Donley Studlar made detailed comments on the manuscript as it progressed.

As a succinct form of acknowledgment, I am pleased to recount names of many to whom I have dedicated books, starting with my father, my mother and her family in rural Illinois, and Mrs W. A. Bemis, a teacher who introduced me to the study of global geography at the age of 14. My fourth book I dedicated to those from whom I learned early on: Bob McKenzie at the LSE; the tough taskmasters who edited my copy at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; two Oxford dons, Saul Rose and David Butler; and my Manchester professor, W. J. M. Mackenzie. Successive secretaries, Margo McGlone, Isobel Rogerson and Ohna Robertson, have shown the capacity to cope with any load. Stein Rokkan, who learned about politics avoiding Germans in Northern Norway, has deservedly had two books dedicated to him. A book each has been dedicated to Rudolf Wildenmann, formerly of Mannheim, and to Heinz Kienzl, Vienna; their commitment to democracy was forged by keeping their inner beliefs alive when conscripted into the Wehrmacht. Richard Neustadt and William Mishler, friends as well as scholars, have also received dedications. What Is Europe? is dedicated to Juan and Rocio Linz, who first pondered this question in the shadow of the Spanish civil war. Appropriately enough, this is the fourth book that I have dedicated to my wife, Rosemary, who has been there since midway in Chapter 2.

Part I

Socialization of a Social Scientist

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Chapter 1

The Roots of a Political Scientist

If someone asks — Where are you from? — almost everyone has more than one answer. You can name the city where you were born or where you live now; Londoners can give the name of their borough and a Viennese the number of their district. If travelling in the United States, saying you are from Europe can be sufficient to explain your ignorance of what the World Series of baseball is about. Saying you are from America can invite Europeans to ask if you know their friend who lives 2,000 miles from your home. History and politics have dealt older peoples of Central and Eastern Europe a more complicated choice: they can either give the name of the city or country in which they were born, for example, Breslau, then in Germany, or Wroclaw, the name it now bears as one of the largest cities in Poland. Naming your birthplace explains the soil in which you are rooted and nurtured, whereas your current residence shows where you have got to through choice or the vicissitudes of work and politics.

When asked where I am from, the answer I give depends on who asks, where, and why. The simplest answer, because of its multiple overtones, is to say that I come from a border state. If a precise answer is appropriate, then I say that I come from the States. This can then be elaborated by adding that I am from St. Louis like T. S. Eliot, and that Miles Davis came from across the river in East St. Louis. My explanation for not living in America now is that, since I couldn’t get spit out of a trumpet, I went to Oxford. If asked in America where I am from, then I reply Missouri or St. Louis. If asked by a St. Louisan where I come from, then I reply, Clayton, the suburb of 15,000 in which I grew up.

If a cab driver in a European country asks me where I am from, the answer is usually Scotland. It is where I have lived for almost half a century and though not a state, it is an internationally recognised place. If a Scot asks me where I am from, the answer is Helensburgh, where the Highlands come down to the sea west of Glasgow. In pursuit of clearer international recognition, my academic base, the University of Strathclyde, has modified its name. Since few people know the meaning of ‘strath’(a broad valley in Gaelic) and not many more know that the Clyde is the river that Glasgow straddles, it now calls itself the University of Strathclyde Glasgow.

The epigram — the past is another country — becomes more relevant the older one gets. Since I was born in St. Louis, the population of the United States has grown by more than 150 million people, while the British Empire, which once had upwards of a billion people nominally subject to its King and Emperor, has disappeared. Of the 28 countries that are now EU member states, most have experienced one or more changes of political regime, France has had four regimes, and Germany has become a paradigm example of a good European democracy.

22 Learning About Politics in Time and Space

The past is not so much gone as it is under foot. In the evocative German phrase it is one’s Grund das Wesen, that is, the ground of one’s being. It is the starting point for learning about politics. Socialization involves learning how to fit into your place of origins and what to make of the opportunities it offers. This is not only a question of what will grow best in the soil, but also what individuals make of their surroundings. Marcel Proust turned a small child’s bedroom in his grandmother’s house in a small French village into the first pages of his multi-volume search for time past. Aaron Wildavsky (1971) celebrated the fact that nobody ever told him he was wrong to go to a low-prestige local school, Brooklyn College, because it gave him the educational foundation to become a world famous academic. Only afterwards does one branch out.

Everyone, including people who become professors, learns about life in many ways besides reading a set list of books and crunching numbers in a computer. One learns from family and friends before going to school, and from books discovered in libraries as well as from textbooks. If you have eyes and ears and intelligence, there is a lot that can be learned by getting out of the familiar setting established by family, friends and school to see what else is happening in your native city. If all these resources are drawn upon, by the time one starts the academic study of social science, there is a fund of experiences against which the concepts and insights in books can be tested. To supplement the limited education offered in my school, I went to the library and explored the streets of a big metropolitan area.

Growing Up in a Border City

St. Louis is on the west bank of the Mississippi River at its convergence with the Missouri River. Together, the two rivers have a length more than twice that of the Danube and five times that of the Rhine. They drain the great mass of land between the mountains that separate the American Middle West from the once colonial cities of America’s East Coast and what was in my boyhood the lightly populated Pacific Coast. St. Louis was founded by the French in 1763 and briefly under the Spanish flag. President Thomas Jefferson took advantage of local difficulties in Europe, that is, the Napoleonic wars, to buy from France the whole of the Louisiana territory, which included the great bulk of the lands west of the Mississippi. St. Louis was never under a British flag nor were there large waves of immigrants from England.

St. Louis boomed in the 1840s, making it a magnet for two groups wanting to leave Europe, Irish fleeing the famine and liberal Germans frustrated by the failure of the 1848 Frankfurt Parliament to unify Germans peacefully (Rippley 1984). My father’s family were South St. Louis Dutch (that is, Deutsch). His grandparents were born in Alsace, whatever country it was then in. The family had arrived in St. Louis by 1860, for one of my great-great uncles served with Union troops in the American Civil War. When I was growing up, the bakeries, the beer advertisements, the turns of phrase and the surnames of many people were German in origin. Thus, the phone book entries under Sch- were as numerous as those for Mac in Scotland. When I visited Mannheim for the first time in 1965 I

Index

AAbrams, Mark 56, 60, 61, 154, 187Acheson, Dean 94Aesthetics 28, 36Alabama iv, 97, 98, 99, 102Albright, William 34Allardt, Erik 60, 70Almond, Gabriel 58, 61, 146, 164Alt, James 87American Voter, The 56Arbitrageur, intellectual 14, 159Architecture 34, 39, 40, 43, 52f, 81, 90,

141, 146, 161Aristotle 36, 47, 123, 141Armstrong, Louis 31, 97, 163Arrow, Kenneth 158Asia 95f, 137, 141, 168Attlee, Clement 10, 38, 49f, 54, 84, 88Austria 132f, 157Aven, Peter 133, 134, 142

BBagehot, Walter 48, 92Baltic states 133f, 157Baltimore 11f, 24, 28, 33f, 37, 96, 97,

101, 152Barometer surveys 13, 89, 132ff, 138ff,

170Baseball 9, 21, 30, 141, 154Bassett, R. O. 50Beck, Dave 43Beer, Samuel 74Bell, J. Bowyer 121Belloc, Hilaire 93Berlin 13f, 23, 34, 79, 89, 105f,

125–140, 151, 160, 162, 166, 168, 180, 185, 189

Berlin, Isaiah 79, 137, 173

Berra, Yogi 26Best practice 184Bevan, Aneurin 88, 187Bevin, Ernest 17, 38, 54Birch, Anthony 57Birnbaum, Norman 56Blair, Tony 79, 88f, 185, 189Blondel, Jean 12, 66ff, 75, 76Bluff, Peter 72Bogside Rising 9, 111f, 116, 121Bow Group 85Boyle, Kevin 120Brecht, Bertolt 153Bribes. See CorruptionBritish Broadcasting Corporation

(BBC) 30, 55, 85, 89, 100British General Election of 1959 55ff,

85ff, 148, 176, 187ffBritish Museum 38, 61British Politics Group 74Brubeck, Dave 97Bulgaria 126, 130fBurroughs, William 29Bush, George H. W. 79, 89Bush, George W. 171–173Butler, David 17, 54ff, 79, 87

CCan Government Go Bankrupt? 161,

182Carter, Jimmy 12, 100Catholics 24f, 100, 108–124, 153Central European University 139Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

121, 127fCentre for the Study of Public Policy

(CSPP) 14, 73, 133, 136, 139, 169, 170, 175ff

Chekhov, Anton 36, 125

206 Learning About Politics in Time and Space

Chester, D. N. 49, 60, 75fChicago, University of 23, 27, 39, 43,

47, 49, 57, 60, 98Churchill, Winston 12, 15, 83–88, 107,

161Citizenship 16Civil liberties 43Civil rights 13, 31, 97, 108ffCivil war 11, 13, 17, 22ff, 30, 96ff, 100,

107–122, 173, 190Class 12, 24ff, 53ff, 61, 82ff, 114ff, 187ffClayton, Missouri 21, 26ffClimate-seeding 176, 187–190Clinton, Bill 79, 83, 103, 106, 171Cold War 126ffColeman, James 70Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 139Colombia 151ffColumbia University 37, 67Committee on Political Sociology 47,

61ff, 126ff, 151, 180Communication 159–174Comparative analysis 34f, 47ff, 77,

96ff, 152, 181ffConcepts 13f, 53, 68, 145–158, 181Conservative Party 50, 84, 86, 117,

148, 187–189Corruption 142, 176, 180, 185Courts 96f, 115Crosland, Anthony 58, 85Crossman, R. H. S 149Currie, Austin 116Czechoslovakia 131

DDaalder, Hans 60, 70Dagen, Margaret Wolfe 27Dahl, Robert 57Dahrendorf, Ralf 50Dalton, Hugh 54Davis, Miles 21Deedes, Wiliam 89Democracy 147Democracy and its Alternatives 138

Deutsch, Karl i, 22, 60, 114Devlin, Bernadette 117Devlin, Patrick 111, 114, 120Devolution 90fDewar, Donald 91Dicey, A. V. 52Dimbleby, David 55Dogan, Mattei i, 60, 62, 67, 126Downs, Anthony 56Dresden 126Drumming 14, 30f, 163Dryzek, John 72

EEaston, David 61, 146Economist, The 72, 83, 148, 159Economy 19, 96 105ff, 188, 134ff,

142–155, 171–176ECPR. See European Consortium for

Political ResearchEisenstadt, Shmuel 61Eliot, T. S. 14, 21, 35ff, 69, 81English as a Foreign Language (EFL)

166Epiphany 147Epstein, Leon 40Essex, University of 67ff, 71fEthnic diffrences 24, 37, 152European Consortium for Political

Research (ECPR) 12, 74f, 167, 169, 178f, 189

European Politics: a Reader 67European Union 76ff, 88European University Institute 17, 70,

77f, 180Evidence 14, 48, 51, 56, 68, 77ff, 103,

113, 132, 148ff, 164, 177ff

FFarming 26fFarrell, Michael 110f, 115Faulkner, William 35fField work 151ffFinancial Times 159, 181

Index 207

Finer, S. E. 52, 66Finn, Huckleberry 14Fitt, Gerry 116fFleet Street 10, 62, 89, 122Fletcher, Banister 39fForster, E. M 44, 69Franklin, Mark vi, 70Freedom 136fFreud, Sigmund 27, 35, 90

GGaitskell, Hugh 84ff, 188Gallup Poll 56, 62, 154Germany 12, 15, 21, 34, 39f, 47, 51f,

60f, 123, 125, 128, 133, 136ff, 146, 157, 181, 189

Gildersleeve, Basil 35fGlasgow 89, 114, 180Glazer, Nathan 95Goldwater, Barry 101, 183Gomillion, Charles 17, 98, 102Goodin, Robert 72Gould, Philip 188fGovernment, growth of 181ffGraduate students 69, 188fGraham, Martha 40

HHailsham, Lord 84Harvard University 45, 67, 114Health research 137f, 157Heath, Edward 51Helensburgh 21, 90–92, 170Hemingway, Ernest 36, 42, 45Hitchhiking 39, 82, 107, 126Hitler, Adolf 9, 125f, 132–134Holiday, Billie 31Hume, John 109ff, 121, 154Huntington, Samuel 70

IIcons 40, 147Influencing Voters 87Inner-directed 31Inspiration 159fInternational Almanac of Electoral

History 149International Monetary Fund 105International Political Science

Association (IPSA) 13, 62, 75, 108, 126f, 153

Iraq 171–173Ireland, Republic of 13, 110, 107–124,

151, 153Istanbul 53Italy i, 40, 44, 62

JJanowitz, Morris 61Japan 95, 142, 184Jazz 11, 12, 14, 30ff, 37, 96ff, 163Jenkins, Roy 82, 153Jews 24ff, 71, 87, 98, 100, 122Johns Hopkins University 11f, 33–37,

47, 96, 101, 107, 141, 151Johnson, Lyndon 12, 16, 24, 42, 100,

102, 179Journal articles 162ff, 168ffJournalism 16, 33–36, 45, 58–62, 87,

165Journal of Public Policy 168f

KKafka, Franz 36Kavanagh, Dennis 57, 86Kennedy, Edward 120Kennedy, John F. 87, 98fKienzl, Heinz 17, 132, 139King, Martin Luther Jr. 97–99Kirkpatrick, Evron 76Klingemann, Hans-Dieter 130Korea 136, 151, 157, 165, 184Kornai, Janos 128

208 Learning About Politics in Time and Space

LLabour Party 38, 49, 54, 84ff, 88, 111,

114, 187Lady Chatterley’s Lover 12Language 152, 154, 157f, 166Laski, Harold 49ffLasswell, Harold 23Legitimacy 103, 107f, 125f, 160, 181Lehrstuhl 67, 72Lenin, V.I. See Useful idiotsLeprechauns 111Lesson-drawing 181ffLevada Centre 135, 140, 154, 169Lewis, M. And Clark, W. 142Lijphart, Arend 26Lincoln, Abraham 16, 23, 123Lincoln College 52f, 83, 101Linguistic philosophy 53, 147Linz, Juan i, 17, 62f, 126Lipset, Martin 12, 24, 47, 56, 61, 63,

105, 114, 151London School of Economics 10ff, 33,

38–40, 49ff, 107, 126, 179, 189Lovejoy, Elijah 43

McCMacArthur Foundation 106Mackenzie, W. J. M. 17, 52, 57ff, 119Mackie, Tom 70, 149Macmillan, Harold 85fMcAllister, Ian 72, 92, 120, 165, 180McCarthyism 16, 36, 126McCusker, Harold 122McDonald’s 184McGovern, George 102McKenzie, Robert T. 17, 38, 50, 61, 90

MMadgwick, Peter 39Malek, Frederic 103fManagement by Objectives 103ffManchester 10, 12, 17, 50ff, 57, 68, 73,

83–90, 99, 146, 156Mann, Thomas 35f

Marvell, Sir Andrew 170Meese, Edwin 178Mencken, H. L. 28Meritocrats 86Merton, Robert 30, 56, 87, 150Methods to Reality 70ffMiller, Arthur 29, 36Miller, William 70, 118Mishler, William 17, 70, 135, 138, 162,

165Mississippi River 22, 25, 41fModels 150f, 181ffMoreton, Edwina 72Morton, Jelly Roll 163, 168Mozart, W. A. 141Munro, Neil 165Music 28ff, 37, 125f, 140, 161f. See

also JazzMust Labour Lose? 56, 151, 187

NNelson, Sarah 121Nettl, Peter 62, 136Neustadt, Richard 17, 79, 95, 99, 120,

152, 179New Baltic Barometer. See Barometer

surveysNew Europe Barometer. See Barometer

surveysNew Russia Barometer. See Barometer

surveysNew Society 58f, 148, 156Niebuhr, Reinhold 15Nixon, Richard 102f, 187Northern Ireland 13, 79f, 99, 107–124,

142, 171–174, 176Nuffield College, Oxford 54ff, 61, 68,

83, 188

OOakeshott, Michael 50O’Casey, Sean 107, 123Olson, Mancur 70, 103, 158O’Neill, Terence 109, 111f

Index 209

Opera 23, 37, 40–42, 140Oxford 10, 12, 34–46, 51–56, 66, 83,

95, 101, 137, 142ff, 175ff, 189

PPaestum 40Page, Edward 50, 72, 189Paisley, Dr. Ian 109ff, 122Parker, Charlie 29, 31Parks, Rosa 97Patience 80, 156, 160Paul Lazarsfeld Gesellschaft 132Pensions 177fPicou, Alphonse 97Plays 14f, 28, 36f, 107Poland 126, 132Political culture 58Political science 47ff, 56, 68–78, 109ff,

162, 172, 175–190Politics in England 12, 58, 91, 107f,

146, 148, 164, 190as Politics in Britain 12, 93

Pool 30Portugal 151Post-Dispatch, St. Louis 9, 17, 28, 33f,

40–43, 59Pound, Ezra 14Powell, Enoch 85PowerPoints 14, 168Presbyterian 28, 96Presidency 88f, 95f, 103–106Presidents and Prime Ministers 88f,

104fThe Prime Minister in a Shrinking

World 89The Problem of Party Government 88Proust, Marcel 22, 37Public policy 175–190Putin, Vladimir 126, 135, 138, 170,

174Putnam, Robert 53, 70, 158

QQuantified data 149f, 181ffQuestionnaires 136f, 154–158, 176

RRace relations 12, 24, 31f, 79f, 82, 96,

99, 102, 189Radio 30Rapport 153Rationing 39, 52Ravenna 40Reagan, Ronald 89, 105, 178, 183Redcliffe-Maud, John 52Reform Club 72, 120, 186Religion 11, 25ff, 52, 82ff, 96, 100,

113–123, 151Reporter, newspaper 9, 28, 37, 40–45,

80, 98, 148, 163Representing Europeans 161, 170Robson, W. A. 50Rokkan, Stein i, 12, 17, 24, 47–64, 67,

70ff, 151, 178Roosevelt, Franklin 9, 30, 36, 89, 105Rose, Charles Imse 23fRose, Mary C. 23fRose, Rosemary J. 13, 17, 44, 50, 130Russell, James 117, 120Russia 125–140, 142, 151

SSaarinen, Eero 25, 41Saint Louis 9ff, 21–31, 40–45, 80, 99,

140, 172Salmond, Alex 93Sartori, Giovanni i, 60, 70, 77, 145Sbragia, Alberta 70Scarman, Leslie 116Schick, Allan 104Schiller, Friedrich 23, 34, 140Scotland 21, 89–94Scott, Dred 25Shin, Doh Chull 157, 165Sidney, Sir Philip 11Simon, Herbert 150, 183

210 Learning About Politics in Time and Space

Sirc, Ljubo 133, 134Soaking and poking 152f, 156fSocial capital 158Social indicators 103South, American 17, 28, 35, 96ff, 101,

111 See also Race RelationsSoviet Union 53f, 126ffSpitzer, Leo 34Stalin, Josef 128, 134, 135, 137Stanford University 110Stevenson, Adlai 16Strathclyde University 12, 21, 66–73,

108, 179ffStrauss, Richard 40Streets, learning from 29–32Studies in Public Policy 139, 170Sullivan, Louis 166Summers, Lawrence 143Surveys 58, 62, 136f, 148f, 154ff, 181Sweden 95fSwisher, Carl B 36System analysis 146

TTeargas 102, 112Thatcher, Margaret 87ff, 131ff, 183The Times (London) 59–63Tocqueville, Alexis de 47f, 145ffTrade unions 84, 188Tragedy 29, 123Training without Trainers 185Transparency International 160, 176,

180Traubel, Helen 23Trilling, Lionel 44Trimble, David 110Truman, Harry S. 15f, 24, 89, 154Turkey 136, 151Tuskegee Institute 98Typing 71, 159–174

UUkraine 133, 151Understanding Post-Communist

Transformation 132, 138

UNESCO 62fUnited Kingdom 89–94, 145, 180Useful idiots 26, 38, 63, 128

VValen, Henry 70Valéry, Paul 165Veblen, Thorstein 27, 47Verba, Sidney 61, 157Verstehen 153Victoria, Queen 12Vienna 29, 40, 132, 139–142Vocational education 158, 185

WWagner, Richard 36, 41, 146fWallas, Graham 49War 9, 12, 29, 36f, 39–41, 60, 123Washington, D.C. 12f, 73, 76, 101–106,

166Watergate 74, 103Webb, Beatrice and Sidney 49Weber, Max 56, 74, 153, 160Wehrmacht 17Welfare State East and West, The 95Weller, Samuel 29What Is Europe? 11, 17Wildavsky, Aaron 22, 74, 164, 179Wildenmann, Rudolf 17, 60, 66, 75,

181fWilliams, Tennessee 28Wilson, Harold 51, 86, 91f, 163Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB)

128ffWittgenstein, Ludwig 53, 107, 147Wolfe, Thomas 35fWorld Bank 105, 133, 139, 158Wren, Christopher 39Writing 9, 14, 56, 70, 72, 159–168Wyatt, Woodrow 188

YYeats, William Butler 107, 123