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| Valdimer Orlando Key, Jr. Ph.D. |
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| Born | March 13, 1908 Austin, Texas |
| Died | October 4, 1963 (aged 55) Brookline, Massachusetts Cambridge, Massachusetts |
| Nationality | United States |
| 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 | Luella Gettys (m. 1934) |
| Children | none |
| Parents | Valdimir [sic] Orlando Key and Olive Terry |
| Notes | |
Valdimer Orlando Key, Jr. (March 13, 1908 - October 4, 1963), usually known simply as V. O. Key, was an influential American political scientist known for his empirical study of elections and voting behavior.
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At about age 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. His completed his dissertation, "The Techniques of Political Graft in the United States" (1934) under Charles E. Merriam's direction.[1]
He taught at UCLA, Johns Hopkins University (1938–49), and Yale University (1949–51) before starting his last professorship at Harvard University in 1951.[1]
In 1936–38 he served with the Social Science Research Council and the National Resources Planning Board.[1]
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. 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 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.
Key also refuted the hypothesis that "Southern backwardness" could be attributed to poor whites. Rather, he asserted that a rich oligarch of "Southern Bourbons" manipulated working class whites, and unified Southern voters to preserve the economic and social order of the time.[2]
Other works by Key include The Techniques of Political Graft in the United States (1936), A Primer of Statistics for Political Scientists (1954), and American State Politics: An Introduction (1956). He pioneered the study of critical elections and served as president of the American Political Science Association in 1958–59.
In October 1961, President John Kennedy appointed him to the President's Commission on Campaign Costs, which reported in 1962.[1]
Key was born in Austin, Texas and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts.