Sidney Verba

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Sidney Verba (born May 26, 1932 in New York , NY , USA , † March 4, 2019 in Cambridge , Massachusetts ) was an American political scientist . Until 2007 he held the Carl H. Pforzheimer Professorship at Harvard University .

Verba is the author and co-author of several books on American politics, comparative political science, and political sociology . In 1994 he was elected President of the American Political Science Association (APSA). He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences , the American Academy of Arts, and the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences. He was chairman of the Political Committee in the Sociology Research Council and the Committee on International Conflicts. His research interests included the relationship between political and social inequality , political participation of the masses, and political ideologies of the masses and elites . Verba was also director of Harvard University Library from 1984 to 2007.

Projects

Sidney Verba headed the “Google Book Search Library Project” at Harvard University in collaboration with Google Inc. This will enable the creation of a digital database of the five largest libraries in the United States and Great Britain . The University of Michigan , Stanford University , New York Public Library and University of Oxford are participating in this project . It is planned to feed over 15 million books into this database. Although there have been several legal actions for copyright infringement , the project has long been on the road to success.

"Civic Culture"

One of the most important works by Sidney Verba is the book " Civic Culture ", which he published in 1963 together with Gabriel Almond . In the course of the study, over 5,000 people in the United States, Great Britain, Germany , Italy and Mexico were interviewed about problems of democracy and political participation . Since political institutions and elites were the main focus of political science at that time and following the behaviorism research that began at that time , Verba and Almond focused their attention primarily on individual behavior and its determining factors. They opposed the, in their opinion, overly simplistic theory of rational decision , which tries to explain human behavior solely on the basis of considerations that maximize benefits.

This model, which is based on two ideal types of citizens, on the one hand the active citizen, who enables a successful democracy through special political engagement and careful information acquisition and evaluation, on the other hand the passive citizen, the poorly informed non-voter who creates a weak democracy criticize the authors. They countered him with the term “civic culture”.

In order to compare the situation in the countries examined, three types of political culture were distinguished:

  • the parochial culture in which citizens are only interested in what is happening near them
  • the subject culture in which the citizens obey the government as long as the political system is performing well
  • the culture of participation, in which the participation of the citizens is desired and takes place.

Almond and Verba see the above-mentioned “civic culture” as an ideal, which is a mixture of these three types. The Federal Republic was classified more as a subject culture, Mexico as a parochial one. The United States and Great Britain are the best examples of well-developed political cultures. In later works, however, Verba also critically addressed the negative impact of social inequality on the political system in the USA.

"The civic culture is a mixed political culture. In it many individuals are active in politics, but there are also many who take the more passive role of subject. "(Civic Culture (1971), p 474)

Awards

Verba received the APSA's Kammerer Prize for the best book on American politics. His book, The Changing American Voter, won the Woodrow Wilson Award for Best Book in Political Science . In 1993 he was awarded the APSA's James Madison Prize, and in 2002 he was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize . He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1968), the National Academy of Sciences (since 1983) and the American Philosophical Society (since 2003).

Works

  • Small Groups and Political Behavior. 1961
  • The Civic Culture. 1963
  • Caste, Race and Politics. 1969
  • Vietnam and the Silent Majority. 1970
  • Participation in America. 1972
  • The Changing American Voter. 1976
  • Injury to Insult. 1979
  • Participation and Political Equality. 1979
  • Equality in America. 1985
  • Elites and the Idea of ​​Equality. 1989
  • Designing Social Inquiry . 1994
  • Voice and Equality. 1995
  • The Private Roots Of Public Action. 2001

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Liz Mineo: Sidney Verba dies at 86. In: The Harvard Gazette. March 7, 2019, accessed March 8, 2019 .