Aage Clausen, professor emeritus in the Department of Political Science at Ohio State University, died in January 2011 at the age of 78. He was an extraordinary person who made major contributions as a scholar and teacher and he was a remarkable individual who was much beloved as a colleague and friend.
Clausen was born in the small town of Dannebrog, Nebraska, in 1932. The son of immigrant Danish farmers, he was fiercely proud of his Danish heritage and his Nebraskan roots. He was raised in a family that gave a high priority to education and learning. But he was the first member of the family to attend college when he went to Grand View Junior College in Des Moines and received his AA degree there in 1952. After service in the Army, he completed his undergraduate education at Macalester College in 1957.
Entering the graduate program in political science at the University of Michigan in 1957, Clausen became an important participant in the pathbreaking research that was taking place at Michigan. He served as Assistant Study Director of the Detroit Area Study for one year. He then served seven years as Assistant Study Director and Study Director for the Political Behavior Program at the Survey Research Center.
At the Survey Research Center, Clausen worked with Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, Donald Stokes, and Warren Miller on the research that was published in The American Voter and the series of publications that followed, research that fundamentally changed our understanding of voting behavior. He contributed much to that research. One of his contributions was invention of the “feeling thermometer,” which became a standard and very useful mechanism with which to gauge people's attitudes toward political objects. With Converse and Miller, he coauthored the 1965 article in the American Political Science Review that analyzed the 1964 presidential election. The article impressively combined the Michigan survey data from 1964 and the political context of that election to understand the landslide victory for President Johnson over Senator Goldwater.
Clausen's work at Michigan led to his most cited article, his 1968 Public Opinion Quarterly analysis of response error in vote turnout reports in the 1964 American National Election Study. He meticulously compared the turnout reports in the survey with those of Census Bureau estimates, and then made the first comparison of turnout reports with official records on the actual respondents. He showed that the overreport of the vote for the winner in surveys was largely due to a stimulation effect of the survey design, with the lengthy SRC/ANES pre-election survey piquing respondents' interest in the campaign and leading many otherwise nonvoters to show up at the polls and vote for the candidate who was advantaged by short-term forces.
After completing his PhD at Michigan, Clausen taught at the University of Wisconsin from 1966 to 1971. He spent the 1968–69 academic year as a visiting professor at Göteborg (Gothenburg) University in Sweden, where he participated in the pioneer 1969 Swedish Riksdag Study. He then moved to Ohio State University, where he taught until his retirement in 1997. He continued to study voting behavior throughout his career, but legislative politics became the primary focus of his research. His forte was skillful and creative analysis of roll-call voting to illuminate the forces that shape legislative behavior.
Clausen had performed much of the scaling analysis for the Miller and Stokes study of legislative representation, as used in their 1963 Review article. His 1964 doctoral dissertation provided the methodological basis of this work. Most notably, he demonstrated that factor analysis could not recover a Guttman scale structure. He devised an alternative set of procedures for scaling of congressional roll calls to alleviate that problem. He combined with two of his close friends, Howard Allen and Jerome Clubb, to use these procedures in an early piece of quantitative study of history, analyzing voting on political reform and the rights of African Americans in the Senate at the beginning of the twentieth century for an article in the Journal of Southern History.
Another important early contribution was his 1967 article in the American Political Science Review, “Measurement Identity in the Longitudinal Analysis of Legislative Voting,” which presented a sophisticated and creative means to analyze the voting of legislators over time and to establish the identity of voting dimensions across Congresses. He applied this approach in a 1970 APSR article, “A Comparative Analysis of Senate-House Voting on Economic and Welfare Policies,” written in collaboration with Richard Cheney, a Wisconsin graduate student (and later US vice president). The article pointed to evidence for two different dimensions in congressional voting, and it identified differences in the sources of voting on the two dimensions. Along the way, the article offered an innovative analysis of sources of change in voting over time. The article was an impressive contribution to scholarship.
This body of research culminated in Clausen's 1973 book, How Congressmen Decide. An analysis of voting behavior across five fields of policy, the book underlined differences in patterns of voting behavior among fields. Delineating the activity of both houses of Congress from the first Eisenhower Congress to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society Congress, he wove his analysis around five policy dimensions: international involvement, government management (of the economy), social welfare, civil liberties, and agricultural assistance. It was a highly influential book that became a classic in the field, and his demonstration of differences among these different policy dimensions influenced research on such diverse areas as presidential speeches and mass voting behavior. His subsequent work with Carl Van Horn showed how new dimensions could develop in these policy fields, particularly a national security commitment reorientation dimension at the time of the Vietnam War. His book and articles helped to initiate what has become a long-standing debate about the dimensionality of congressional voting. He participated in this debate with contributions such as his 1991 article with Clyde Wilcox in Legislative Studies Quarterly, “The Dimensionality of Roll Call Voting Reconsidered” in which they argue for a multiple correlated dimension view of roll call voting rather than the unidimensional perspective that has come to dominate in recent years.
Clausen's work extended to other topics in legislative behavior. In two articles he analyzed legislators' ability to perceive the views of their constituents. In another article he analyzed the ideological placement of congressional leaders. He took creative and effective approaches to these topics.
With all his success as a publishing scholar, Clausen derived the most satisfaction in research from puzzling through issues that he found intellectually and substantively interesting. That quality was reflected in the care that he brought to his work. It also was one of the qualities that made him such a good colleague, one who improved the work of other scholars with his insightful and constructive suggestions.
Clausen was one of the generation of leading scholars who helped to strengthen the political science department at Ohio State and bring it national recognition. Beyond his own work, he contributed to that development as Director of the department's Polimetrics Laboratory from 1984 to 1993. Under his direction the lab gave invaluable training to several cohorts of graduate students while providing crucial help to other graduate students and faculty in carrying out their research. The lab had what may have been the last working counter-sorter for computer punch cards in the country, reflecting Clausen's belief that a lot could be learned from watching the data sort themselves physically. It was under his leadership that the lab conducted The Ohio Political Survey (TOPS) in midterm election years, and he was responsible for moving these surveys to computer-assisted telephone interviewing. The TOPS studies provided the basis for a substantial body of research by OSU faculty and graduate students.
Clausen provided major service to the broader academic community as well. He was on the editorial boards of the Journal of Politics and Legislative Studies Quarterly, and he served two separate terms on the board of the Midwest Journal of Political Science (which had become the American Journal of Political Science by the time of his second term). He sat on the council of the Midwest Political Science Association from 1986 to 1989. He served on the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research Council from 1977 to 1981 and chaired it in 1980–81. Perhaps his most important professional contribution was his leadership in development of the Social Science History Association, which he helped to make an important interdisciplinary organization and a catalyst for major scholarship. He was a member of the editorial board for Social Science History from 1975 to 1986, and he was president of the Association in 1986.
Throughout his career, Clausen was a committed and talented teacher. He taught courses that ranged from large sections of the introduction to American politics to seminars for PhD students, and he brought the same dedication to all of them. He was especially renowned as a teacher of statistics for graduate students, first at Wisconsin and then in the two-course introductory sequence at Ohio State. He had a rare ability to bring students through the steps needed to understand the body of knowledge on statistics, and his gentle style helped to reassure students for whom statistics was a scary matter. At the end of the first day in one class, when he sensed that students were fearful about the major assignment for the course, he said simply, “Don't worry; things will work out fine.” His statistics courses attracted not only political science students but graduate students in other departments who had heard of his skills as a teacher.
After his retirement, he brought his teaching to another venue, giving the largest part of his time to daily service as a volunteer tutor in mathematics in a Columbus middle school. Working with students from disadvantaged backgrounds, he bridged the 60-year gap in age with a dedication that the students recognized and responded to. That he gave so much energy to this task was one of the clearest signs of his devotion to service.
Clausen's final research project displayed his ongoing passion about the fundamental inequalities he saw in the costs of war: those paid by the poorest Americans from rural areas of the country who gave up their lives in fighting what he saw as fruitless, unnecessary, and unwinnable wars. He had noticed that newspaper accounts seemed to mention small towns disproportionately when giving the hometowns of American killed in the War in Iraq. He enlisted Dustin Koenig, one of the brightest undergraduates at Ohio State, in tracking down the hometowns of American service people who died in that war. Their unpublished paper is a notable demonstration of a consequence of the change to a volunteer army, with the heavily urban background of Americans killed in the Vietnam War displaced by the heavily rural background of those who lost their lives in the service of their country in US involvement in Iraq.
He was sensitive to the difficulties of scholars who faced obstacles in the path to academic success. His concern for women in the profession was reflected in his membership on the Midwest Political Science Association Committee on the Status of Women from 1972 to 1975. On a very different level, he sought to address the problems of quantitatively oriented scholars at liberal arts schools in a pre-Internet era in which those scholars might lack easy access to colleagues who shared their interests and expertise. In 1992 he secured a large grant from the National Science Foundation to sponsor a summer workshop in which those scholars could interact with Ohio State faculty and each other to advance their research agendas. The workshop was a great success in achieving its purposes.
In the same spirit, Clausen sought to make education accessible to students who, like himself, had not taken the standard route from high school to college. He did so by helping to fund the Lifelong Learning Scholarship program at his first college, which had become Grand View University. The scholarship is designated for “non-traditional students” who are returning to the education system after some years away from it or who are married or have children.
In his interactions with students, colleagues, and friends, Clausen exhibited a quality that could best be described as fundamental decency. Modest and unassuming, he treated everyone with courtesy and kindness, and that was especially true of those who were in insecure positions—graduate students and junior faculty. In department meetings he spoke seldom, but what he said had an impact on other faculty because of his common sense and his regard for the concerns of others.
Outside the academic world, Clausen had a wide array of interests, among them golfing, spectator sports, and theater. He brought both an amiable spirit and an analytic eye to all his pursuits. He was a devoted fan of the Ohio State women's basketball team, but at games he sat calmly and charted trends in the score even while those around him exulted or despaired.
Clausen was married to Geraldine Clausen, a psychologist whom he met at Michigan. It was characteristic of him that he married a strong woman. She shared his admirable qualities, and the two of them complemented each other well. As her health failed in the last years before her death in 2004, he devoted his life to her care and comfort, subordinating everything else to making her life as good as it could be. He is survived by their son Jon.
Aage Clausen was an accomplished political scientist. More important, he was a good and kind man who made the lives of people around him better. He is missed a great deal by the people who knew and loved him.
