Richard Matland – memoriam

Though not mentioned in the complete notice below, Richard Matland contributed a great deal to the study of Canadian politics. Speaking just for myself, Richard’s work (co-authored with Donley Studlar) kickstarted my own research program in two important articles. “Gender and the electoral opportunity structure in the Canadian provinces” PRQ  1998  and “The growth of women’s representation in the Canadian House of Commons and the election of 1984: a reappraisal, CJPS 1994. He left us too soon. Louise Carbert, past-president of CPS

The Loyola University Chicago community mourns the death of Richard E. Matland, PhD, professor in the Department of Political Science. Rick passed away on Sunday, August 12.

In 2006, Rick joined the political science faculty as the Helen Houlahan Rigali Chaired Professor, teaching both undergraduate– and graduate–level courses focused on political trust and behavior, the role of women in politics, and research design and methodology.

Rick’s research and teaching spanned several fields within the discipline of political science, including comparative politics, public policy, women’s studies, and American politics.

His research was published in a variety of scholarly journals including the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Political Psychology, and Social Science Quarterly. He was the author of numerous book chapters, as well as the co-editor of the book, Women’s Access to Political Power in Post-Communist Europe, published in 2003 by Oxford University Press. He was also the recipient of numerous external grants, most notably from the National Science Foundation.

An active contributor to Loyola’s graduate program in political science, Rick also chaired the department’s grants committee. Colleagues describe him as an inspiration who challenged others to think outside the box, especially in the science of politics.

Professor Olga Avdeyeva, PhD, said of her colleague, “Richard Matland was a caring mentor, a cherished friend, and a dear colleague. His irrepressible curiosity and natural wittiness inspired many students and colleagues in the field. He was courageous, funny, and smart. I will miss him dearly.”

Mildred Schwartz on S.M. Lipset and the fragility of democracy

MILDRED A. SCHWARTZ

published March 21, 2017, OUP blog

Seymour Martin Lipset passed away eleven years ago. If he had lived, he would have celebrated his 95th birthday on 18 March. Today, his prolific scholarship remains as timely and influential as when he was an actively engaged author. Google Scholar reports 13,808 citations between 2012 and the beginning of 2017. All of Lipset’s papers have been collected at the Library of Congress and soon will be available to researchers. One cannot think of other contemporary social scientists of his caliber who remain as relevant.

Two years before Lipset’s passing, the Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture called ‘Democracy in the World’ was jointly inaugurated by the National Endowment for Democracy and the Munk School of Public Affairs at the University of Toronto. The annual lecture, delivered in both the United States and Canada, is subsequently published in the Journal of Democracy. The 13 lectures delivered thus far reflect and extend Lipset’s concerns with the conditions needed for the emergence and sustaining of democracy, and do so by moving outside the Anglo-American and Eurocentric world to Russia, China, Latin America, and the Arab world (e.g., Pierre Hassner’s “Russia’s Transition to Autocracy” (2007), Abdou Filali-Ansary’s “The Languages of the Arab Revolution,” (2012), and Anthony J. Nathan’s “The Puzzle of the Chinese Middle Class.” (2016).

In all the discussions of the difficulty of establishing democratic governance and its fragility in newly democratized states, there had been little concern with anti-democratic drifts in Western Europe, the Anglo-American countries, and particularly the United States. But recently, new fears have arisen, as nationalist movements opposed to immigrants and globalization have grown in these countries. Larry Diamond, writing shortly before the outcome of the 2016 US election, discerned the growing decline in support for pluralism and democratic procedures. His discussion refers back to Lipset’s analysis, co-authored with Earl Raab in 1978, of “procedural extremism,” where diverse perspectives become defined as illegitimate and their expression is shut down.

Political scientist: Seymour Martin Lipset by Hoover Institution. Fair Use by Wikimedia Commons.

Not only has Lipset been called on to explain current challenges to democracy, but his past writing has also been invoked to understand why particular population groups have been mobilized to support those challenges. Donald Trump’s rise to political power and election as President is now linked to Lipset’s concept of working class authoritarianism, published in Political Man (1960). From news analyses to empirical academic studies (presciently, Hetherington and Weiler 2009MacWilliams 2016), authors attribute a considerable part of Trump’s attraction of working class voters to the latter’s authoritarian views.

Lipset’s affection for Canada and his use of that country as a contrast to the United States, thus illuminating critical characteristics of both countries, continues to inspire others to mine differences and similarities between the two and to test Lipset’s explanations for why differences continue to exist. For example, Moore et al. (2016) examine differences in attitudes toward crime and justice, and conclude from parallel surveys done on each side of the border that Lipset’s (1990) hypothesis about value differences has strong empirical support. Lipset’s model for the close study of two such similar countries remains inspirational and was recognized by the Canadian Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, beginning in 2011, when the Section inaugurated its book prize award and named it in his honor.

Lipset’s work on political parties and social stratification are additional areas that continue to provoke new questions and new research. Bornschier (2009) reviews work on the continuing relevance of the concept of cleavage to party formation in both old and new democracies. He concludes that, by putting “primary emphasis on the enduring character of collective political identifications resulting from large-scale societal transformations as the defining element of cleavages,” the concept retains its broad efficacy.

Similarly, Achterberg (2006) examines the continued relevance of social class in understanding voting behavior in 20 western countries. Using party manifestos and data from the World Values Surveys, he concludes, in an elaboration on Lipset, that societal changes and the emergence of new issues have not caused class voting to disappear but to undermine its dominance.

Happy birthday Marty—friend, mentor, inspiration. Rest in peace—your work lives on.

Mildred A. Schwartz is professor emerita in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and visiting scholar in sociology at New York University. She is the author, co-author, or editor of 10 books and 60 articles. Her most recent book, Party Movements in the United States and Canada, received the Seymour Martin Lipset Best Book Award from the Canadian Politics Section of the American Political Science Association in 2011. She is the author of the Oxford Bibiliographies in Sociology article “S. M. Lipset.”