V. O. Key, Jr.
| V. O. Key Jr. | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Valdimer Orlando Key Jr. March 13, 1908 Austin, Texas |
| Died | October 4, 1963 (aged 55) Brookline, Massachusetts |
| Other names | V. O. Key |
| Education | McMurry College in Abilene, Texas University of Texas at Austin, B.A. 1929, M.A. in political science in 1930 University of Chicago, Ph.D. 1934 |
| Occupation | Political scientist |
| Known for | a leader of the "behavioral movement" in political studies |
| Home town | Lamesa, Texas |
| Spouse(s) | Luella Gettys (m. 1934) |
| Notes | |
Valdimer Orlando Key Jr. (March 13, 1908 – October 4, 1963), usually known simply as V. O. Key, was an American political scientist known for his empirical study of American elections and voting behavior. He taught at Johns Hopkins University and Harvard. According to Chandler Davidson, "When Southern Politics in State and Nation was published in 1949, Key's reputation...was established beyond question. The book was magisterial, a brilliant sweeping survey of eleven southern states that destroyed once and for all the myth of the 'solid South.'"
V.O. Key was born in Austin, Texas.
When he was 15, his father, a lawyer and land owner, sent him to McMurry College for his last two years of high school and first year of college. He transferred to the University of Texas at Austin (B.A., 1929; M.A., 1930), and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1934. He completed his dissertation, "The Techniques of Political Graft in the United States" (1934) under Charles E. Merriam's direction.
From 1936 to 1938, he served with the Social Science Research Council and the National Resources Planning Board.
He taught at UCLA, Johns Hopkins University (1938–49), and Yale University (1949–51) before starting his last professorship at Harvard University in 1951.
During World War II, he worked with his mentor Harold Foote Gosnell at the Bureau of the Budget.
In 1942 Key published the first edition of his textbook, Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups, in which he emphasized that politics was a contest and the main players were organized interest groups. The book decisively shaped the teaching of political science by introducing realism in analysis of politics, introducing the "interest group" model, and introducing behavioral methods based on statistical analysis of election returns. It went through three editions but was not revised after his death. His Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949) was a microscopic examination, state by state, of Southern politics using interviews and statistics. The book is considered one of the most influential books on the subject. Furthermore, the book is the cornerstone of a prominent college seminar taught by the University of Notre Dame's political science department. In Public Opinion and American Democracy (1961) he analyzed the link between the changing patterns of public opinion and the governmental system. He opposed the Michigan model that argued voters' preferences were determined by psychological factors, thereby, in his view, taking most of the politics out of political science. In his posthumous work, The Responsible Electorate: Rationality in Presidential Voting 1936–60 (1966), he analyzed public opinion data and electoral returns to show what he believed to be the rationality of voters' choices as political decisions rather than responses to psychological stimuli.
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