Gosnell, Harold

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Gosnell, Harold 1896-1997

Harold F. Gosnell played a major role in the development of the scientific approach to political research. He was among the first political scientists to utilize randomized field experiments, correlation, regression, and factor analysis, which he skillfully blended with archival research, participant observation, elite interviewing, and ethnography to produce seminal studies of elections, voting behavior, party politics, political machines, and African American politics.

Harold Gosnell grew up in Rochester, New York, and received a bachelor’s degree from the Univeristy of Rochester in 1918. He matriculated as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where, under the tutelage of Charles Merriam, he received a PhD in 1922. Gosnell immediately joined the political science faculty at the University of Chicago, where he was part of the nucleus of the Chicago School of Political Science, which endeavored to construct a science of politics on the model of the natural sciences.

Gosnell was deeply concerned with the functioning of elections and the factors that led citizens to participate in them or not. His Non-Voting: Causes and Methods of Control (1924), authored with Merriam, examined a random sample of 6,000 nonvoters in the Chicago mayoral election of 1923. It identified the principal causes of non-voting as non-registration, disbelief in women’s voting, disgust or indifference, and physical impairments or difficulties. Merriam and Gosnell argued that efficient party organization and simplification of registration laws would enhance citizen participation in elections. In Getting Out the Vote (1927) Gosnell conducted randomized field experiments in the Chicago elections of 1924 and 1925 to determine whether nonpartisan notices could stimulate citizen registration and voting. He found that a nonpartisan appeals could boost registration by about 9 percent but mattered less where party organizations were strong and education levels high; they had a greater marginal effect on women, African Americans, and the less educated.

A fascination with party organizations, especially political machines, permeated almost all of Gosnell’s work, starting with the first of his twelve books, Boss Platt and His New York Machine (1924), which traced the rise and fall of machine politics in New York. In Negro Politicians (1935) he documented changes in Chicago politics brought about by the northward migration of African Americans, their loyalty to and role in the Republican Party, and the first signs of shifting loyalties to the Democrats after the initiation of the New Deal. He detailed the centrality of black churches and the black press (especially the Chicago Defender ) in mobilizing opinion and sustaining organization in the community. Gosnell generalized his arguments on party organization in Machine Politics: Chicago Model (1937). He demonstrated the success of ward bosses and precinct captains in insulating the parties from broader trends in national politics brought about by the Great Depression. Gosnell saw ballot simplification, proportional representation, civil service laws, and other reforms as ways to wean democracy from the imperatives of patronage and graft.

Gosnell left Chicago in 1941 for Washington, D.C., where he held positions in several federal agencies and then served as professor of political science at Howard University from 1962 to 1970. The American Political Science Association recognizes his achievements by awarding each year the Harold F. Gosnell Prize of Excellence for the best work of political methodology presented at a political science conference.

SEE ALSO American Political Science Association; Chicago Defender; Democratic Party, U.S.; Elections; New Deal, The; Politics, Urban; Random Samples; Republican Party; Sampling; Science; Statistics; Survey; Voting