Political scientists rarely study the influence of wealthy elites on politics, much less their influence on the science of politics. The growing literature on the history of American political science is no exception. Although disciplinary histories often place political science in the context of broader social and political forces, disciplinary historians rarely explore how philanthropic and government patronage shaped political science research and graduate education. Enter Emily Hauptmann. Her book breaks new ground in the study of political science history by illuminating the material basis of the discipline’s intellectual development.
The book focuses on the two decades following World War II, when material conditions were ripe for philanthropic patrons to transform political science. Wartime federal support for social science research all but vanished at the war’s end, making it possible for even relatively modest foundation grants to make a difference. The rapid clip of faculty hiring prompted by the explosion of undergraduate enrollments created a situation in which the intellectual disposition of political science departments was up for grabs. And the proliferation on university campuses of Organized Research Units (ORU) designed to attract external funding provided foundations with eager clients whose research agendas were easier to shape than those of the often resistant and fragmented faculty of disciplinary departments.
Based on meticulous research in the archives of the Carnegie Corporation, Ford Foundation, and Rockefeller Foundation, Hauptmann painstakingly reconstructs their captains’ aspiration to remake the social sciences into attractive candidates for renewed government patronage. For Carnegie and Ford, this meant promoting a practical and technically sophisticated social science that Ford dubbed “behavioral science.” Carnegie used the Social Science Research Council as a conduit for supporting major projects that “set the stage for the behavioral revolution in political science” (p. 48). The Carnegie-funded study of the 1952 presidential elections, for example, not only yielded classic works such as The American Voter (1960) but it also sowed the seeds for the creation of the tremendously influential American National Elections Studies data project. The Ford Foundation, for its part, spent $24 million between 1950 and 1957 to steer the social sciences in a behavioral direction. Ford-sponsored grants and fellowships accelerated the careers of behaviorally inclined political scientists and offered them training in statistics. Its patronage also spurred university administrators—most notably at Stanford University—to push their political science departments in a behavioral direction against the faculty’s wishes. Hauptmann concludes that “the unusually large and directive grants Ford made sparked and fueled the behavioral revolution” (p. 77). Importantly, she finds little evidence that the foundations’ initiatives were inspired by demands from political scientists. Political scientists responded to the foundations’ behavioral science agenda more than the other way around.
The Rockefeller Foundation took a more eclectic approach than its counterparts. It extended substantial support for behavioral projects, including significant grants that were crucial to the survival of the University of Michigan’s national election studies after the Carnegie Corporation discontinued its support. At the same time, Rockefeller invested heavily in political theory and international relations theory, motivated by its leaders’ belief that these fields had an important role to play in the ideological Cold War and in advising US foreign policy makers. Rockefeller’s emphasis on pressing social science in the service of the Cold War foreshadowed and converged with the Ford Foundation’s reorientation of its program, after 1957, from behavioral science to international and area studies. From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, Ford invested $138 million in international and area studies programs, which fostered close ties between scholars and policy makers and shaped the contours of the field of comparative politics through the end of the Cold War.
A key strength of Hauptmann’s book is her insistence that “the history of political science is … the history of political science in the university” (p. 11; emphasis added). Whereas other disciplinary historians explicitly or implicitly locate the profession in political science departments, Hauptmann’s account dovetails with a recent trend in the study of American higher education to emphasize the significance of nondepartmental spaces on university campuses, including, importantly, ORUs. As noted earlier, after World War II, many university leaders sought to transform their institutions into research powerhouses in part by setting up externally funded research centers and institutes that were administratively independent of disciplinary departments. Hauptmann effectively demonstrates the significance of such ORUs for the development of political science by zooming in on two major campuses: the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley.
At Michigan, the bulk of the foundations’ support for behavioral research was channeled to the Institute for Social Research (ISR) and its subsidiary, the Survey Research Center. Generous foundation support provided ISR-affiliated political scientists with substantial resources—research and travel funds, release from teaching duties, graduate student assistantships, and the like—that were scarcely available to other members of the political science department. Entrepreneurial scholars such as Warren Miller and Samuel Eldersveld shrewdly leveraged these resources to transform the political science graduate program and ultimately place the department’s leadership in the hands of behavioralist-friendly scholars.
At UC-Berkeley, although the Rockefeller Foundation earmarked its grants in political theory and international studies to the political science department, the Ford Foundation directed its massive patronage to the Institute of International Studies and its affiliated area studies centers. These units provided some members of the political science department with second academic homes whose abundant resources helped these scholars curtail the power of the department’s political theorists. Philanthropic patronage thus “solidified the centrality” of Cold War-oriented international and area studies to political science at UC-Berkeley (p. 135).
An intriguing insight presented by the book is that the battle at the University of Michigan between the ISR-affiliated behavioralists and their older political science colleagues was not about research methods. Hauptmann shows persuasively that these tensions were instead rooted in a deep disagreement on the purpose of political science. For the older guard, the discipline’s main mission was to prepare students for public service, whereas the younger advocates of behavioral political science sought to orient graduate training and political scientists’ careers predominantly toward research. Similarly, the conflict that pitted the international and area studies faculty against the political theorists at UC-Berkeley in the 1960s was not about how to study politics. At its core, the conflict—which coincided with the emergence on campus of the free speech movement—reflected radically divergent visions of the university: Should it refashion itself as a community of scholars and students committed to knowledge for its own sake (the vision favored by the theorists and allied student activists), or should the university continue its transformation into a massive producer of research useful to government and corporate clients?
The book concludes with a thought-provoking observation. Hauptmann points out that the research-oriented culture of political science shaped by the foundations in the mid-twentieth century remains in place even as the favorable material conditions of that era—abundant philanthropic and (later) government research support, coupled with a rapid expansion of faculty ranks—no longer apply. Doctoral programs in political science continue to produce large cohorts of hyperspecialized researchers even though research patronage has become scarcer (the National Science Foundation, for example, has recently phased out its political science program) and even though higher education institutions have increasingly been hiring contingent instructors at the expense of full-time research-oriented faculty. I wonder if conditions are ripe for contemporary mainstream philanthropic leaders (Bill/Melinda Gates? Michael Bloomberg?) to transform political science once again by realigning it with current political-economic realities.
