Eulau, Heinz
EULAU, HEINZ
EULAU, HEINZ (1915–2004), U.S. political scientist. Born in Offenbach, Germany, Eulau went to the U.S. as a young man in 1935. He earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in political science from the University of California-Berkeley from 1937 to 1941. During 1946–47 he was assistant editor of the New Republic and then taught at Antioch College. He worked in the Library of Congress in Washington and later in the Department of Justice, and in 1958 became professor of political science at Stanford University and served as chair from 1969–74 and 1981–84. Eulau was one of the leading exponents of the behaviorist trend in American political science, which attempted to transform the study of political science into a scientifically oriented discipline based on empirical research and a wide interdisciplinary frame of reference. A path-breaking scholar in the field of legislative research, he specialized in the theory and practice of political representation and electoral behavior. The behavioral movement, which he brought to Stanford, introduced psychology and sociology to study the linkages between political institutions and citizens. He was also instrumental in creating a new field of research focusing on the systematic quantitative analysis of citizens' attitudes and choices. His thesis was set out in his work The Behavioral Persuasion in Politics (1963), which followed Political Behavior (1956) and Legislative Behavior (1959), both of which he co-authored with J.C. Wahlke. In 1961 he became general editor of the International Yearbook of Political Behavior Research and was also associate editor for political science of the International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (1968).
Eulau was president of the American Political Science Association from 1971 to 1972. In 1976, he helped found Legislative Studies Quarterly, a journal published at the University of Iowa. He retired from Stanford in 1986 but remained active as the William Bennett Munro Professor Emeritus of Political Science. He also wrote The Legislative System (1962), Class and Party in the Eisenhower Years (1962), Lawyers in Politics (1964), Political Science (1969), Labyrinths of Democracy (with K. Pre-witt, 1973), Technology and Civility (1977), The Politics of Representation (1978), Politics, Self and Society (1986), and Micro-Macro Dilemmas in Political Science (1996). In 1998, he took a light-hearted swipe at university life in The Politics of Academic Culture: Foibles, Fables and Facts, and in 2001 co-authored a family history, The Mishpokhe from Eulau-Jilove.
In 1986, the American Political Science Association established the Heinz Eulau Award to honor his contributions to political science. In 2002, the Heinz Eulau Political Behavior Fellowship was established by the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society. In 1999 he was awarded the Warren E. Miller Award for meritorious service to the social sciences, one of the country's highest honors in the social sciences.
His wife, cleo mishkin eulau (1923–2004), died five days after her husband. She was the Stanford University adjunct clinical professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. In 1994, the Cleo Eulau Center was founded as a service and study center dedicated to developing innovative solutions to helping at-risk children and teens. In 2002, she was the first woman and first non-psychiatrist to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from Stanford's department of psychiatry.
[Edwin Emanuel Gutmann /
Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)]