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Lifetime Contribution to Political Studies

Prof Richard Rose

Professor Richard Rose was the jury’s unanimous choice for the Sir Isaiah Berlin Prize for Lifetime Contribution to Political Studies. Over his long professional life, spanning almost five decades, his contribution to the field of political studies has been phenomenal. He has been extraordinarily prolific. Many of his works are essential reading and help to define the discipline, across a range of subjects, including but not confined to, comparative parties and elections, the politics of the UK, the growth of government and comparative public policy. At the same time he has contributed significantly to the development of political studies as a profession, in recognition of which the Political Studies Association made him an Honorary Vice-President in 1986 and presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000.

Richard Rose was born in 1933 and grew up in St Louis, Missouri. His early ambition was to become a journalist. After receiving his BA in two years – half the normal period of study – he left for England where he enrolled abortively as an MSc student in the London School of Economics. Robert McKenzie supervised his thesis, but Rose abandoned it in order to revert to his original plan of journalism.

After a spell on the St Louis Post-Dispatch, in 1957 Rose once again departed for England, this time to embark on a DPhil. His thesis examined the disjuncture between the British Labour Party’s foreign policy in opposition and its actions in government. He completed the thesis in 1959. The following year he was co-author with David Butler of The British General Election of 1959, and with Mark Abrams of Must Labour Lose?, but it was not until 1961 that he embarked on his career as a political scientist, after being offered a job in the Department of Government at the University of Manchester. Rose lectured in Manchester for five years before being appointed to the politics chair at the University of Strathclyde, which was to be his home for the next 39 years. In 2005 Rose moved to the University of Aberdeen as Professor of Politics.

A prolific output has included many standard works on British and European politics; Professor Rose’s recent publications include works in areas as diverse as comparative parties and elections, comparative public policy, e-government, EU expansion and patterns of smoking in Russia. His 39th book, Understanding Post-Communist Transformation: A Bottom Up Approach, appeared earlier this year. In 2007 Professor Rose was one of a small group of experts called on to offer President George W. Bush a new perspective on the situation in Iraq. Given three minutes to put his point across, he related the Iraqi position to that of Northern Ireland in 1969. A divided society, he told Bush – quoting Max Weber – ‘can be a stable society – provided that there is a state that has a monopoly of the institutions of violence and prevents foreign and armed incursions across its borders’. Until that condition was met, the implication was, the Iraqi problem would persist.

As well as his own research, Professor Rose has provided help and inspiration to many other political scientists and has been a leading figure in establishing professional networks within the political science community. He co-founded the European Consortium for Political Research, and the British Politics Group of the American Political Science Association, devoting many years of service to these and other organizations. Among many honours bestowed on him Professor Rose has received the Policy Studies Organization’s Lasswell Lifetime Achievement Award and the Robert Marjolin AMEX Prize for International Economics. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an Honorary Doctor of Örebru University, Sweden. Earlier this year Professor Rose received the 2009 Dogan Foundation Prize in Political Sociology, awarded jointly by the Fondation Mattei Dogan and the European Consortium of Political Research for his major contribution to the advancement of the field.