{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.033005057226510516, 'fraction_numerical': 0.010646792653713068, 'mean_word_length': 5.0128, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Who Lost the Chicago School of Political Science?

C harles Merriam’s presidential address to the American Political Science Association in 1920 urged the collaboration of various social sciences in the study of politics, particularly stressing the importance of statistics and psychology, and emphasizing the “good works” consequences of his scientific approach. It was really a rather homely talk. Twenty years after Merriam’s programmatic statement, the University of Chicago’s Political Science Department had produced 80 Ph.D.’s, sending them to teach all around the country. (In all its previous 30 years, it had only produced 13 Ph.D.’s.) By the early 1950s, the department had fertilized Yale’s Department of Political Science through its staffing of the Institute of International Studies. It also provided scholars for the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia when William T. R. Fox moved there with several of his students. The Yale Institute took part of its University of Chicago contingent with it when it transferred to Princeton, where it became the Center of International Studies; it also supplied staff for the Institute’s offshoot at MIT and for the RAND Corporation, when Bernard Brodie and Alexander George joined the social sciences team. The scholars trained in the Chicago department, and their students, have enriched the entire corpus of political science—in American politics (e.g., V. O. Key, David Truman); comparative politics (e.g., Gabriel Almond, Sidney Verba, Lucian Pye, Myron Weiner); constitutional law (e.g., Herman Pritchett); public administration (e.g., L. D. White, Avery Leiserson, Herbert Simon); and international relations (e.g., Frederick Schuman, William T. R. Fox, Klaus Knorr, Bernard Brodie). A very large proportion of the seminal scholars of the 1950s and 1960s were directly or indirectly products of the Chicago school. The leading texts on American political parties, interest groups, and comparative politics were authored by University of Chicago Ph.D.’s. Six of the 20 presidents of the American Political Science Association from 1954 until 1974 came from the Chicago school. Taken all in all, this is a very big impact—and one without an obvious explanation. Why so? Truly it is difficult to explain the rise of the Chicago school of political science, which occurred fully 20 years before behavioralism broke out all over. The Chicago school (started by Merriam, his colleague Harold Gosnell, and Merriam’s student Harold Lasswell) had no help from international politics. It was a time when democracy was being crushed on the European continent and when freedom of inquiry and scientific research seemed to have little future in the scheme of things. When behavioralism attained national and general proportions, it was after World War II, in the middle of the great scientific revolutions of nuclear physics and molecular biology, with the threatening Soviet competition of Sputnik overhead. It was overdetermined. In the post–World War II decades, there was plenty of necessary and sufficient causation for the behavioral revolution. But between the World Wars, there seems only to have been Merriam—with a great need for power and creativity, on the one hand, and on the other, a frontier university with a reputation to make and a department long dominated by a repressive and absentee chairman, who had suddenly vacated. In 1920, Merriam was 47 years old, not too long returned from his military career in Italy. With his political aspirations crushed in a failed mayoral campaign against a corrupt and ruthless Republican political boss, Merriam had the choice of returning to Columbia with endowed-chair distinction or taking over the Chicago department, which had dwindled to