Nelson Polsby Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Nelson Polsby (1934–2007) was an American political scientist who studied the presidency and Congress. Born in Norwich, Connecticut, Polsby earned a bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1956, a master’s degree in sociology from Brown University in 1957, and a doctoral degree in political science from Yale University in 1961. His dissertation was published as Community Power and Social Theory (1963). He argued a single ruling group did not dominate cities, but that there were different dominant groups in different areas and that this pluralism was compatible with democracy.

Polsby taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1960 to 1961 and Wesleyan University from 1961 to 1967. He joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in 1967 and served as the director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University from 1988 to 1999.

Polsby was the managing editor of the American Political Science Association’s American Political Science Review, the discipline’s most important journal, from 1971 to 1977. In 2002, he received the association’s distinguished service award.

Polsby wrote or edited fifteen books on American politics and a number of articles. He first gained attention by asserting that much of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s success was due to support he received from the Republican Party. Polsby later analyzed, in Consequences of Party Reform (1983), how changes in the electoral rules of the Democratic Party after 1968 changed presidential politics. The changes, while giving increased representation to African Americans and women at the Democratic Convention and giving single-issue groups greater influence in the party, made it difficult for the Democrats to nominate a candidate with broad-based support that would allow them to win elections. He also explained how the House of Representatives had become a more complex institution and how policy entrepreneurs impacted major initiatives in American political life after World War II (1939–1945). His 1968 article, “Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives,” was listed in 2006 as one of the twenty most influential articles to be published in the American Political Science Review during its first one hundred years.

In 1964, Polsby and fellow political scientist Aaron Wildavsky published Presidential Elections. This book became the leading textbook on the topic and was published every four years, with Polsby serving as the sole author after Wildavsky’s death in 1993. The twelfth edition was published posthumously in July 2007, a few months after Polsby’s death.

Polsby’s scholarship was not limited to American politics. In 1981 he and Geoffrey Smith, a writer with the Times of London, coauthored British Government and its Discontents. Polsby had spent time as a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and as the Olin Professor of American Government at Oxford.

Bibliography:

Polsby, Nelson Community Power and Political Theory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963.
Consequences of Party Reform. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
How Congress Evolves: Social Bases of Institutional Change. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Political Innovation in America: The Politics of Policy Initiation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.
Political Promises: Essays and Commentary on American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

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