The Forgotten Lindsay Rogers and the Development of American Political Science

Now largely forgotten, Lindsay Rogers addressed public and scholarly audiences, crossed intradisciplinary boundaries, and wrote about developments in political science. His career illuminates key changes in American political science, including a turn away from traditional institutionalism and engagement as a public intellectual and toward quantification and the academy, and a separation of political theory from empirical research. Understanding why his work was left behind reveals important events and mechanisms that produced disciplinary change. Rogers's work was lost from the canon because of political and institutional developments in political science, including academic survey researchers' efforts to maintain polling's legitimacy after the 1948 election; efforts by proponents of the behavioral revolution that oriented the discipline toward hypothesis-testing but also made it more internally segmented; and the scholarly entrepreneurs' creation and cultivation of institutions, curricula, and networks of scholars, which developed and promulgated empirically oriented quantitative approaches.