“He always made you think”

Ted Lowi was my senior honors thesis advisor when I graduated Cornell in 1965. I took his course on Congress my junior year and always regarded him as my favorite professor. It was my junior year when I read his extended book review of Bauer, Poole and Dexter and became a student of his theory of Arenas of Power. I worked closely with him on my honors thesis, in which he took great interest, because it was an early attempt to test Arenas of Power empirically.

I looked at all the bills introduced in a single Congress. Ted predicted that distributive bills would get the least amendments on the floor, [regulatory] bills (which allowed classic logrolling and trading of votes across different issues) would get more, and redistributive bills (e.g. Social Security), which were basically income transfers across class lines, would get the most or they would so split the Congress that the real decisions would be made in the executive branch and the courts. Although, I had some trouble classifying omnibus bills, the predicted relationships held. 

I always spent time to look up Ted when I returned to Ithaca. When I served on the Clinton Health Care task force he invited me to Ithaca to give a talk on the bill and its politics. Since I worked in Washington, I always went out of my way to see him when he was giving a talk to Cornell alumni.

Ted was exciting, stimulating, and his classes oversubscribed. He was fundamentally an institutionalist and he criticized pluralist theories that tended to overplay the role of interest groups and underplayed the role of the institutional rules and their inter-relationships. The End of Liberalism was one of the first major critiques of pluralism from this perspective. Ted also criticized over-delegation of Congressional discretion to the courts as a weakening of its institutional role.

You might not always agree with Ted, but he argued strongly and he always made you think. He will be impossible to replace.

George Greenberg

College of Arts and Science

Cornell Class of 1965