Tribute of Colleagues

Christopher J. Anderson
Cornell University

Ian Budge
University of Essex

Ronald F. Inglehart
University of Michigan

Hans-Dieter Klingemann
Freie Universität of Berlin.

Michael D. McDonald
Binghamton University, SUNY

As with David Cameron, Rick Hofferbert entered our lives and changed their trajectories in ways that have proved rewarding through today and, we suspect, so long as we will inherit this good earth.

Rick's life began on April 2, 1937, in the rural environs of Grant County, Indiana. By age 20 he had the good fortune and great wisdom to marry his high school and lifelong sweetheart, Rosemarie Besemer Hofferbert - Rose to all who knew the two of them. At age 22 Rick graduated from Indiana University with an A.B. in political science, and he and Rose were rearing their first son, Mark. Just three years later, and one year before the birth of their second son, Sam, Rick earned his Ph.D. from Indiana under the supervision of American democratic theorist and past APSA president, Charles Hyneman. That same year, 1962, age 25, Rick took a position at Williams College.

Rick's earliest scholarship, while still in graduate school, looked into the organization of the lieutenant governorship in Indiana. At Williams he continued to work on American state politics but with a broader perspective. His first post-doctoral publication was an article that sought to improve on the Ranney/Kendall and Schlesinger classifications of competitiveness of state party systems. This was at the time of the 'reapportionment revolution' brought about by the Supreme Court decisions in Baker and Reynolds. As Rick would later recount, in class one day he was opining about how the revolution would remake many state party systems and, with that, the nature of public policies in, at least, the most grossly malapportioned states. One of his students was brave enough say: "Professor, you keep saying that without data one is hearing the thoughts of just another guy with an opinion; aren't your musings about malapportionment an example of you being one of those guys with just an opinion?" Rick returned to his office, called home to tell Rose he would be late, asked her to pass along his good-night kisses to Mark and Sam, pulled a copy of the Statistical Abstract of the United States from his shelf, and took it to the computing center to create a state policy data set. Lo and behold, "there is no obvious relationship between the numerical equality of a state's apportionment system and … the welfare orientation measure" (APSR 1966: 75).

With that finding and similar results in a series of articles over the next few years, Rick burst like a bombshell on the political science scene of the 1960s. In the two decades after the Second World War political science had concerned itself with power and democracy, focusing on the latter through the study of parties and elections on the assumption that they totally determined policy. Rick's study of policy outputs and expenditures across the American States showed that policies could be explained in terms of non-political influences, structural and socio-economic factors, with politics hardly getting a look in.

Suddenly public policy became a popular object of study, with 'Does Politics Matter?' standing as a compelling question that political scientists needed to answer. In 1967, Rick and the family made the move to Cornell for a four year stay. By the conclusion of the decade Rick's research and writing, along with and sometimes in direct association with political scientists such as Tom Dye and Ira Sharkansky, helped to add a new focus for the discipline. In state politics research, Dye … Hofferbert … Sharkansky … were the obligatory citations.

Rick himself was never a Marxist (to understate his position). As a staunch democrat he devoted the rest of his research career to reversing his own finding. Politics did matter; in particular, political parties mattered for what policy choices democratic governments made. But, we're getting ahead of ourselves. In the next 15 years Rick's scholarly output was interwoven with his contributions to institution building. For, in 1970, he left Cornell for Michigan to serve as Executive Director of ICPSR, and later, in1975, he left Michigan for Binghamton to re-start its Ph.D. program. It was during these years that Rick entered our individual orbits.

Ron Inglehart was at Michigan when Rick arrived and recalls those years. In 1970, Richard Hofferbert was recruited by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research to direct the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, and to teach in the political science department. Directing the ICPSR from 1970 to 1975, Rick provided strong leadership, developing an extensive network of international members and broadening the archive's holdings considerably. He cultivated strong ties with foreign universities, as reflected in the fact that he was later invited as a visiting professor or visiting scholar at the University of Mannheim, the Berlin Social Science Research Center, the Free University of Berlin, the University of Essex, Strathclyde University, the University of Lausanne, and Bogazici University in Turkey. While at Michigan, he carried out extensive and innovative policy research and was a superb mentor of graduate students.

Rick was a wonderful colleague, full of intellectual enthusiasm. He greatly enriched both the intellectual and social life of the political science department while he was at the University of Michigan. When he left Ann Arbor in 1975 to go to Binghamton, he was missed tremendously. I personally really missed him and his family, but we kept in touch for many years and got together at various places from Binghamton to Berlin to Istanbul. He was one of my closest friends. RI

It was during this period when Rick first crossed paths with Hans-Dieter Klingemann. That proved to be a rich experience professionally and personally. Hans-Dieter fondly remembers their lifelong bonds in these ways.

Richard I. Hofferbert first entered West German academia in 1972/73. He had only shortly before arrived in Ann Arbor to serve as director of the ICPR (now ICPSR) when he met Hans-Dieter who was attending an ICPR Summer Course to brush up his skills in social science methodology. At that time I, Klingemann, worked at the University of Cologne's Central Archive for Empirical Social Research. Thus, it was quite natural that the two of us get together to discuss archival matters. In the end we came up with a joint project: the German Electoral Data Project. This project generated codebooks in English language and OSIRIS data files of all German national election surveys. It gave a boost to comparative electoral research. And three of the promising youngsters Rick had put to the task grasped the opportunity and wrote Germany Transformed (Kendall L. Baker, Kai Hildebrand and Russell J. Dalton. New Haven: Harvard University Press, 1981), a volume that has become a classic in German electoral research.

In 1975 Rick decided to leave the Midwest and move to the State University of New York at Binghamton. The ICPR priorities were left behind. The public policy whizz kid was supposed to continue in his original field and build a strong political science department. At that time I had left Cologne and joined Max Kaase to set up the Center for Survey Research (ZUMA) in Mannheim. Meanwhile, I met with Ian Budge to support an entirely new and original project that tried to chart programmatic profiles of political parties in the OECD world since 1945. Rick learned about this project at one of my visits on his farm in upstate New York. Sitting on the deck near the pond, sipping red wine, and smoking pipes we speculated what could be done with these data over and above testing spatial or coalition theories. It must have been the genius loci to suggest that they look at the relation of the parties' programmatic profiles and the spending behavior of governments. Rick was enthusiastic about it. He became a core member of Ian's party manifesto group and published extensively. In 1994 the first major results were summarized in Parties, Policies, and Democracy.

In 1980 I accepted a position at the Free University of Berlin. From 1989 to 2003 I also directed the Research Unit on Institutions and Social Change of the Social Science Research Center Berlin. This provided the ideal institutional setting to continue our long-term cooperation. In the 1990s alone, Rick (and Rose) visited at least six times. Rick had accepted a recurring visiting professorship formally linking him to the Science Center. These years turned out to become among Rick's most productive times. His interests in the impact of party manifestos on political decision-making persisted. The fall of the Berlin Wall added another item to his research agenda. He analyzed causes and consequences of transition from autocracy to democracy in Germany as well as in central and eastern Europe. His last book, The Dynamics of Democratic Satisfaction, co-edited with Christopher Anderson and published in 2001 as an issue of the International Political Science Review, had been devoted to this topic. In 1999 Rick stopped his travels to Europe because of his health problems. However, in the day of the Internet it was easy to continue the exchange of ideas.

In all these long years of academic cooperation our families have supported us and we have grown together. Rick, Rose, Mark and Sam, Hans-Dieter, Ute and Julia have become as close as one can ever get. For this I am eternally grateful.

Rick had a clear analytical mind. He also was a gifted writer. His German was impeccable. All those who had the privilege to work with Rick in Germany profited from this cooperation. I am proud to call him a friend. HDK

Rick's colleagues at Binghamton appreciate how much success Rick brought to the political science graduate program and to the intellectual and social life of the department more generally. Every academic year that Rick and Rose were not on leave somewhere in Europe the fall semester opened with a Saturday gathering of faculty and graduate students at the Hofferbert farm. The only thing that Rick insisted must flow more freely than the beer and wine was conversation to ensure that everyone get to know one another as people. Michael McDonald recounts the thoughtfulness and unflagging effort he gave to making Binghamton's Department of Political Science an enjoyable place to work and learn.

In 1975 Binghamton was at the earliest of early stages in its transition from a predominantly liberal arts institution to a doctoral granting institution. Rick was recruited with the hope of giving the graduate program immediate standing and charged with focusing the Ph.D. program on a specific sub-disciplinary field. Of course, his chosen focus was policy analysis.

The late 1970s were not a period favorable to new projects in public higher education. The oil crisis and the upward slope on what was to become known as the misery index had much of the country and almost all of public higher ed in the doldrums. Rick was not to be discouraged nor deterred. He diagnosed his major challenges as twofold. First, he reasoned that any doctoral program, most especially a newly forming one, has to be able to recruit talented and highly motivated students. Second, in the face of austerity measures facing public higher education, with doctoral education the most expensive of all its forms, Rick wanted 'his' graduate program not merely to avoid becoming costly but to provide a financial benefit to the University at large. To accomplish both, he decided to start not one but two new programs: a political science doctoral program focused on policy analysis and a Master of Arts in Public Policy Analysis and Administration (MAPPAA, for [not so] short).

The two-track graduate program would allow for recruitment of a half dozen of the best applicants to the doctoral program and 20 to 25 MA-level students. Several first-year courses would be cross-listed to ensure healthy seminar enrollments. The concurrent enrollments would keep costs down, and the large majority of MAPPAA paying their own tuition would ensure that the overall graduate program was a financial plus for the University. Moreover, the MAPPAA program would help to repay support from the State by educating policy analysts and public administrators to work in NY state and local government. Entwined in all this thinking about the graduate program carrying its own load financially were his thoughts about recruiting for the Ph.D. program. The MAPPAA program would bring to campus a couple dozen students whose intellectual strengths and ambition the faculty could assess up close. The very best MAPPAA students, with the right amount of scholarly inclination, would be recruited into the Ph.D. program.

After 12 years of resolute leadership, Rick had his first health related scare and turned leadership of the program over to others. He had constructed institutions that would endure. As his own scholarly interest broadened, he became an enthusiastic supporter of re-labeling the focus of the graduate program to the study of democratic performance. After another 12 years his MAPPAA program would mature to become an independent Department of Public Administration and a short time later a NASPA accredited MPA program.

What Rick did for the graduate programs at Binghamton he did for individuals, me most definitely. He would see a path that might be rewarding to take and invite her or him to join him. He would provide a few stepping stones, open a door or two, and invite you across the threshold. So long as you were professional in outlook and looking out for the well-being of others along the way, you could be on Rick's team. Nothing else mattered much. We were an odd set of colleagues in all the obvious ways-in stature, Rick was an imposing physical presence; in demeanor, Rick's personality was bigger than his physical presence; in political outlook, Rick relished wearing his conservatism as a badge-but the closest of colleagues in all the important ways-all institution building is win-win-&-win for your department, college, and university; all matters of opinion can be reasoned through in the light of evidence.

In early 1987, shortly after his heart scare, Rick came crashing through my office door with an excitement as if to announce he discovered gold in the hills around Binghamton. It wasn't gold he had discovered but the pre-publication manuscript of Wright-Erikson-McIver's "Public Opinion and Policy Liberalism in the American States" (AJPS 1987). Politics does matter! he exclaimed in his never understated way.

With his graduate director duties about to be turned over to someone else and with his just-then emerging interest in the party manifesto and policy project with Hans-Dieter and Ian taking root, Rick and I talked weekly about what was needed to take long, hard, sober look at representative democracy-what, if anything identifiable, were the mechanisms for popular control over public policy. His interests took him in the subfield of comparative politics while mine remained focused on American politics. By the early 1990s, however, our conversations led him to suggest that I join him, along with Ian, Hans Keman, and Paul Pennings, on the project they had planned to carry out during a year in the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. He then insisted, enlisting Ian to re-insist, to the directorship at the Institute that I be part of the team "or there will be no team." Sincerely threatened?-who knows; as usual Rick was persuasive. That year was the most eye-opening and rewarding year of my professional and (my own and my family's) personal life.

Alas, new health issues for Rick intruded on and sometimes interrupted the work of our NIAS team. Rick, with Ian especially, plus the insights of Hans and Paul, had established such a foresighted plan that the project Rick brought me into has occupied most of my professional work until this very day. In fewer words, my life is immeasurably better because I knew Rick Hofferbert. MDM

Having firmly established the graduate program that he and the university at Binghamton wanted for the Political Science Department, Ian Budge remembers what he calls Rick's 'mature years.'

In the eighties Rick returned to the explanatory variables in a comparative context. Better data were now available on the preferences of key political actors across many countries, and Rick had an unrivalled grasp of the details of expenditure. With Hans-Dieter Klingemann he started to put the two together with spectacular results.

It was Hans-Dieter who introduced us to exploit the time series of party preferences compiled by the Manifesto Research Group and applied previously to party policy movements and coalition formation. Rick generously brought me in to share his data and added my name to a research paper he had largely written and which won a prize at the Southern Political Science Association meeting in 1988. It became the basis of an influential article in the APSR in 1990, demonstrating a close link between American party emphases in their platforms and their expenditure priorities while in power.

Extending this research to ten countries in collaboration with Hans-Dieter, and reporting in a series of articles and a book in the mid-seventies, led us to meet in a variety of places in the US and Europe, notably in Berlin at the WZB and at Binghamton, where Rick and Rose put us up at their farm. We swam in their pond, walked in their woods, and conversed endlessly about research and life. We were fortunate to be brought into the heart of their family, introduced to their sons, granddaughter, friends, and colleagues, inserted into the congenial Binghamton department and introduced to the surrounding townships and countryside. In Europe we spent time at the WZB in Berlin at the fall of the Wall and experienced the growing pangs of German reunification. Rick was always a practical democrat, passionately interested in real life as well as theoretical politics, a committed defender of individualism, choice, and human rights. Berlin gave him an ideal basis to explore these themes academically and practically, through frequent trips into East Germany and encounters with Rose's relatives and other friends from both East and West.

Research, academic and practical interests were all to be synthesized in a book planned to emerge from a stay at NIAS (Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies) in 1995-6. Rick was to get together with his Binghamton colleague Michael McDonald, along with Hans Keman and Paul Pennings from the VU Amsterdam, and myself to put the link between politics and policy beyond doubt. Indeed we spent a very happy year there together and prepared all the data for analysis.

Disastrously, however, Rick's health collapsed in the course of the year, in a most dramatic fashion. The situation characteristically and paradoxically emerged from his general optimism and belief in technological and medical progress. In the mid-eighties suffering from sinus problems, he had decided to simply solve them through an operation. This was botched and eight years later the growth of scar tissue almost mortally affected his breathing. With two operations during his stay in the Netherlands and one shortly after returning to America, he was in no fit state to continue with the project nor, eventually, in academic life.

He confronted health problems with a gallant insouciance, joking about being able to subsist totally on his massive intake of tablets. But he had to face a lot-sinuses, burst appendix, hip replacement, eye operations, and the heart problems which finally got him-always bravely positive about (most) doctors and technology. He himself always made the best of things, living life to the full, immersing himself in his warm and supportive family. In terms of his life-long research project however he had to pass the torch on to the rest of us. Without Rick's participation Organizing Democratic Choice has taken 15 years but is finally appearing - dedicated, justly, to his inspirational vision. DEDICATION: "To Richard I. Hofferbert, who initiated the project but was prevented from finishing it with us. We hope it lives up to his noble ideal of strengthening democracy by understanding it better." IB

Even those who came to know Rick in the last few years of his career could readily appreciate the power of his intellect, the force of his personality, and the energy he put into his professional life. Chris Anderson puts it in these words.

Rick Hofferbert seemed like a walking contradiction to this colleague who encountered him late in his career and who ended up being hired into the position he vacated. You could see him coming from miles away, and he was forceful up close - worryingly so to some. Yet those who knew him knew about the passion he had for his fellow travelers and his big heart for those who could use his help. He was a decidedly serious scholar, teacher, and colleague, but he didn't take himself too seriously. He was enormously accomplished, yet without an air about him and modest to the core. Rick had enormous energy - often more than more junior colleagues - despite debilitating health issues. He loved 'doing' political science and worked hard on it late into his career, yet seemed entirely content to retire and dedicate himself to new endeavors, including his family history. Perhaps more than anything, he was perennially optimistic when there was plenty to be pessimistic about in the modern public university. He clearly had invested a lot of his life in the Binghamton department and delighted when others shared his passion.

Rick was strongly opinionated about virtually everything (to understate just a bit), yet willing to change his mind when the evidence warranted it. He wholly embraced and lived by the principle he had passed along to his Williams' students: "Without data, you're just another guy with an opinion." He believed in the democratic-ness of evidence and the decency of others, occasionally bewildered why not everyone was like him.

Whatever you made of Rick, he was someone you had to contend with - someone who would ask you questions, not to expose you but out of genuine curiosity; someone who actually cared a great deal - he'd even ask you whether you hadn't slept well the night before if you were flagging before the day was done. His days were done much too early, but it was a life well lived and lived to the fullest. CJA

Richard Ira Hofferbert was promoted to the rank of Distinguished Professor by the State University of New York's Board of Trustee in 1997. This is a rank "reserved for professors whose work has brought them to distinguished international prominence in their field." That description fit Rick as well as it could anyone. Sadly for his friends around the world in political science and most especially for those close to his home at Binghamton University, two years later, 1999, Rick decided to retire.

Rick and Rose spent the next 12 years living six months in Binghamton and six months in Florida. He found a new research project to engage his mind and entertain his family and friends in the form of documenting his and Rose's family histories. Even with this new research project at the daily forefront of his mind, he could not entirely shed his love of teaching. When in Binghamton, he offered pro bono services to a local civic association to help immigrants prepare for their citizenship exams.

This is how Richard I. Hofferbert is to be remembered: a man with a big heart, strong opinions, a love of family, a passion for research and ideas, a desire to open new and interesting doors, a knack for laying secure and fertile institutional foundations, and a keen sense of how to make all life experiences rewarding for him and for others.

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