Stanley Kelley, Jr., a creative scholar and legendary teacher at Princeton University, died on January 17, 2010, at the age of 83.

Kelley joined the Princeton faculty in 1957 and stayed for more than half a century. His career-long commitment to Princeton, its students, and its faculty made him a model of dedicated university citizenship. He retired from teaching in 1995 but remained active in the Princeton community, participating in colloquia, advising senior thesis students, and working on his final book, a distillation of his career as a student and teacher of party politics.

Kelley created a substantial scholarly legacy through his pioneering studies of party politics, political campaigning, partisan mobilization, and electoral interpretation. While he did not covet professional prestige, the quality and significance of his scholarly work brought him many professional honors, including a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, a stint on the Board of Overseers of the National Election Studies, and election in 1993 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Princeton repeatedly honored Kelley's skill and dedication as a teacher. He received the university's Distinguished Teaching Award; a Visiting Professorship for Distinguished Teaching bears his name; and the Department of Politics annually presents the Stanley Kelley, Jr., Teaching Award to one of its most outstanding teachers. These are fitting tributes to a colleague for whom teaching was a career-long passion.

Kelley was born on December 7, 1926, in Detroit, Kansas. He attended the University of Kansas for one year before serving in the U.S. Army in the Pacific theater during World War II. After the war, he returned to earn his A.B. and M.A. degrees, followed by a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. His studies at Johns Hopkins were interrupted by a year as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Rome—the beginning of a lifelong attachment to a city he would revisit many times. Following the completion of his Ph.D., he spent two years at the Brookings Institution before arriving in Princeton.

During his time at Princeton, Kelley performed every conceivable sort of university service. He served as chair of the politics department; a member of the powerful campuswide Advisory Committee on Appointments and Advancements; a mentor to successive generations of junior faculty; and a cherished friend to philosophers, sociologists, and scientists. As chair of the Committee on the Structure of the University from 1968 to 1970, he played a major role in designing the institutions that continue to shape Princeton. The report of the Kelley Committee led to the creation of a more open governing process with greater participation by students and nontenured faculty members. William Bowen, a colleague and friend who went on to serve as president of Princeton, described the Kelley Committee's report as “the best commentary I have ever seen on how universities should be run.”

When the journalist and Princeton alumnus Don Oberdorfer wrote the history of Princeton University several years ago, he characterized Kelley as an “advocate and architect of constructive change,” highlighting both his official role as chair of the Kelley Committee and his unofficial role as a voice of reason during the tense period of political unrest during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Oberdorfer recounted the “anger and frustration” expressed at an impromptu gathering of some 2,500 students and faculty in the University Chapel in response to President Nixon's bombing of Cambodia in the spring of 1970. The turning point of the meeting, according to Oberdorfer, came when Kelley “issued a stirring appeal to channel anger into constructive action for change.” Other universities erupted in violence; Princeton erupted in activism.

Kelley's influence in university affairs stemmed from his fair-mindedness, diligent preparation, and clear, persuasive reasoning. He was justly proud of his rhetorical skills. A former colleague once complained about being on the losing side of a committee debate. “I was right,” the former colleague said, “but they voted nine to one against me. I wish you'd been there; it would have been nine to two.” “If I'd been there,” Kelley replied, “it would have been nine to two the other way.” It was a rare moment of immodesty, but he was probably right.

Kelley's party politics course was a highlight of Princeton's undergraduate curriculum for more than three decades. Every lecture was a gem, brilliant and carefully polished. Kelley's style was rigorous, creative, and often humorous, encouraging students not only to absorb facts but to engage ideas. Alumni speak glowingly about their experience in the course, and Kelley's files include dozens of warm letters from former students reporting on their careers, their reactions to the political news of the day, and their gratitude for what he taught them. Amazingly, Kelley had his own recollections of many of his hundreds of former students. A few years ago, when Samuel Alito was appointed to the U. S. Supreme Court, Kelley recalled his impressions of Alito as a smart, hardworking undergraduate some 35 years earlier.

Serving as a teaching assistant for Party Politics was a prized assignment not only for Princeton graduate students, but also for faculty colleagues. Many of them still recall the transformational educational experience of watching a master teacher at work. Jonathan Krasno of SUNY–Binghamton wrote,

Krasno added that even after 30 years in the classroom, Kelley would be “unavailable the night and morning before a lecture; he uses the time to immerse himself once again in the subject, to weigh and reconsider each word. It is an exceptional effort, but the results are evident when he speaks.”

Kelley was similarly dedicated to graduate teaching. His first Ph.D. student, Gerald Pomper of Rutgers, called him a “consummate teacher,” observing that Kelley “had a witty and knowing love of language, always seeking the perfect phrasing of his own excellent scholarship, always prodding his students toward exact and clear expression.” He demanded precision from his students and stressed the importance of clear writing, the essential role of well defined concepts, and the critical need for compelling evidence. Well-crafted arguments mattered to Kelley. Students wanting feedback on dissertation chapters or papers had to give him a good deal of lead time to offer comments. The lead time was necessary not because Kelley was slow to make time to read the work—on the contrary, he always made time for his students. Rather, he would painstakingly read the chapter or paper, offering detailed comments on every page, rewriting sentences, questioning assumptions, suggesting better ways to test hypotheses, and prodding the author to think more precisely about key terms. He was not only a consummate teacher, but also a consummate critic.

Kelley demanded the same excellence from himself that he demanded from others. He would not let any piece of work out of his possession that was not polished and ready to shine. As his sometime-collaborator William Bowen put it, Kelley was about “getting it right.” That perfectionism—and his dedication to teaching and university service—ensured that Kelley would never be a prolific publisher of scholarly work. His career as a scholar is a classic example of the importance of quality rather than quantity. Nevertheless, he succeeded in publishing three masterful books and a score of articles and book chapters over the course of his 40-year career.

Kelley's first book, Professional Public Relations and Political Power (1956), provided the first scholarly account of the role of political consultants in postwar American politics. Writing at a time when the application of public relations techniques to political campaigns was still in its infancy, Kelley shrewdly anticipated that the rise of a new breed of political consultants would alter the conduct of elections. He provided a series of richly textured case studies of the actions of public relations specialists, contemplating their emergence as key figures in what has come to be called “candidate-centered” politics. Tracing their influence to the demise of party machines in the wake of Progressive Era reforms, he also provided a characteristically clear-headed assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of this new style of campaigning. On one hand, he noted, the politics of public relations make for a “closer approach of democracy to its own ideal” by encouraging citizens to cast their votes on the basis of broad appeals rather than narrow personal benefits. On the other hand, he noted that those broad appeals would not always be high-minded or informative, and that the huge expense of modern public relations campaigns would significantly disadvantage less affluent candidates and causes.

Kelley's second book, Political Campaigning: Problems of Creating an Informed Electorate (1960), was in significant part an outgrowth of his first book. It offers a superb deductive, normative analysis of what constitutes a good campaign. Kelley developed a clear and compelling set of standards by which to judge the quality of campaigns in the era of professional public relations. Contending candidates should have equal access to the electorate; issues and alternatives should be clearly spelled out; candidates should debate policy differences without stooping to personal attacks; persuasive messages should be clearly attributed to their sponsors. These considerations may seem obvious from the perspective of 50 years later, but that reflects the extent to which they have been absorbed into the thinking of generations of campaign reformers, including proponents of televised debates, “ad watches,” and campaign spending disclosure requirements. Kelley's interweaving of empirical and normative analysis is both sophisticated and practical, providing an admirable model for political scientists who aspire to bring scholarly understanding to bear in the political arena.

Kelley's article on “Registration and Voting: Putting First Things First” (with Richard Ayres and William Bowen, American Political Science Review, 1967) spawned a considerable literature on the concomitants of electoral turnout. By demonstrating the significance of burdensome registration procedures in reducing turnout, Kelley and his coauthors shed significant light on why Americans turn out at lower rates than citizens of other advanced democracies—and at lower rates than their counterparts in the nineteenth century, before the adoption of voter registration requirements. This work also helped to lay the scholarly foundation for the 1993 “motor-voter” law, which makes it possible for citizens to register to vote while engaging in such routine actions as renewing a driver's license.

Kelley next turned to voting behavior, publishing a masterful article on “The Simple Act of Voting” (with Thad Mirer, American Political Science Review, 1974). Kelley showed that voters' choices could be well predicted and understood by a simple tally of the positive and negative considerations they mentioned in response to open-ended questions about the competing candidates and parties. In Interpreting Elections (1983), he used those same responses to open-ended survey questions to provide an elegantly transparent analysis of the substantive considerations shaping specific election outcomes. Kelley's analysis challenged the value of the concept of “mandates” in modern democracies, demonstrating that informal assessments of the “message” sent by the electorate often distort the complex mix of considerations underlying actual voting behavior. Even the historic landslide of 1972 turns out to be a “close landslide” in Kelley's account, with much of Nixon's majority coming from conflicted voters unenthusiastic about both candidates. Interpreting Elections is a subversive book, both conceptually and methodologically. (Anyone doing survey research should ponder Kelley's six-page critique of the “pseudo-opinions” elicited by fixed-choice survey items.) At the same time, the book represents a signal achievement in Kelley's self-proclaimed effort “to puzzle out how elections contribute to, or impair, the health and stability of democratic government.”

In the 1980s, Kelley's abiding interest in the relationship between scholarship and practical politics led him to play a central role in the creation of the Graduate School of Political Management, a pioneering professional school for politicians and political operatives. As founding provost, Kelley helped to design the school's curriculum, establish procedures for recruiting faculty, and admit the first class of students. When the Graduate School of Political Management was subsequently incorporated into George Washington University, Kelley expressed satisfaction with its success in achieving a distinctive mission: “not only to teach about politics, as most of us in departments of political science do, but about how to do it.”

Kelley's intellectual and personal influence can be seen in many corners of the discipline. When he retired from active teaching, former students and friends organized a conference in his honor. Several of the many scholars whose lives and work have been touched by Kelley's intellect and dedication served as presenters or discussants—Douglas Arnold, Larry Bartels, Nancy Bermeo, Anthony Broh, James DeNardo, John Geer, Fred Greenstein, Amy Gutmann, Jennifer Hochschild, Michael Kagay, Jonathan Krasno, David Mayhew, Tali Mendelberg, Walter Murphy, Ronald Rogowski, Thomas Romer, Thomas Rochon, Carol Swain, Dennis Thompson, and John Zaller. A volume dedicated to Kelley, Politicians and Party Politics (John Geer, ed., 1998), includes several essays presented at the conference as well as Kelley's own final lecture from his Party Politics course, a reflection on Max Weber's famous essay on “Politics as a Vocation.”

Stanley Kelley was an original. His warmth and good humor were evident to everyone who encountered him, even at the end of his life. Those of us who knew him will miss him for those qualities and for his keen intellect, integrity, and deep and unflagging loyalty to his friends and students.

Kelley is survived by his brother, Glenn, of Hannibal, Missouri, and five nieces and nephews. Memorial contributions may be made to the Stanley Kelley Teaching Prize, Princeton University, Department of Politics, 130 Corwin Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544. (Checks may be made payable to the Trustees of Princeton, and in the memo field, donors should write: Stanley Kelley Teaching Prize.)