Elmer Eric Schattschneider
Elmer Eric Schattschneider | |
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Born | Elmer Eric Schattschneider August 11, 1892 University of Wisconsin |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | Political science |
Institutions | Wesleyan University |
Elmer Eric Schattschneider (August 11, 1892 – March 4, 1971) was an American political scientist.
Life and career
Schattschneider was born in Bethany, Minnesota. He received his BA and MA at the University of Pittsburgh and his PhD at Columbia University. He taught at Columbia, the New Jersey College for Women (now a section of Rutgers University), and Wesleyan University (1930–1960). Schattschneider was president of the American Political Science Association between 1956 and 1957 and is the namesake of its award for the best dissertation in the field of American politics. He died in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.
Publications
Schattschneider's books include Politics, Pressures and the Tariff (1935), Party Government (1942), The Struggle for Party Government, (1948), Equilibrium and Change in American Politics (1958), The Semisovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America (1960) (for a discussion see: Mair, 1997[2]), and Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of a Government (1969).
Critique of pluralism
Along with the
In The Semisovereign People, Schattschneider argued the scope of the pressure system is really quite small: The "range of organized, identifiable, known groups is amazingly narrow; there is nothing remotely universal about it" and the "business or upper-class bias of the pressure system shows up everywhere." He says the "notion that the pressure system is automatically representative of the whole community is a myth" and, instead, the "system is skewed, loaded and unbalanced in favor of a fraction of a minority."[4] And "the flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent."[5]
Notes
References
- Adamany, David. 1972. "The Political Science of E. E. Schattschneider: A Review Essay." The American Political Science Review 66 (December): 1321–1335. JSTOR 1957185(subscription required)
- Schattschneider, Elmer Eric. 1960. The Semisovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ISBN 978-0-03-013366-4.
- ISBN 978-0-13-569757-3.