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Herbert McClosky, professor of political science emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, died on March 13, 2006, of pneumonia and complications of Parkinson's disease in Oakland, California. He was 89 years old.
McClosky was a pioneer researcher in the empirical study of political beliefs, attitudes, and ideologies through the use of survey instruments. From 1960 until shortly before his death, he was a major force in the work of Berkeley's Survey Research Center, and the program of political behavior he established as a graduate teaching field in Berkeley's political science department populated the entire profession of political science with a great many of the nation's leading academic specialists in the study of public opinion and attitude measurement.
McClosky's own research included two major books, Dimensions of Tolerance: What Americans Believe About Civil Liberties (with Alida Brill, 1983), and The American Ethos: Public Attitudes Toward Capitalism and Democracy (with John Zaller, 1984), and a large number of articles written over the last half-century that are still cited and relied upon by contemporary researchers to set the agenda for current empirical research on the beliefs and ideologies of American elites and ordinary citizens. One of these articles, "Consensus and Ideology in American Politics," was recently identified as the 13th most cited American Political Science Review article since 1945. He also wrote a major text on the Soviet Union, The Soviet Dictatorship (with John E. Turner, 1960), and Political Inquiry (1969), an...