A 2025–26 Fellow’s Ghost Stories
CASBS fellows often choose their offices (what we call studies) here on the hill for a very specific, sometimes personal, reasons, or get inspired once they see the list of former fellows (‘ghosts’) who occupied their studies throughout CASBS history. Olukunle P. Owolabi, a 2025–26 CASBS fellow and associate professor of political science at Villanova University, reflects on the intellectual influence of two ghosts who once occupied his study — #16.
I am very fortunate to have a lovely corner study with plenty of natural light to motivate my writing and intellectual creativity at CASBS. I chose this study not only because of its corner location, but also because of my admiration for the academic writing and legacy of two of the ‘ghosts’ that inhabited my study during CASBS’s early years. The first, Seymour Martin Lipset (1922–2006), was a highly regarded sociologist and comparative political scientist who is best known as one of the leading scholars of modernization theory — i.e. the idea that socio-economic modernization promotes and reinforces democratization in capitalist societies. The core ideas of Lipset’s seminal article, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy” were conceived during his fellowship year at CASBS in 1955-56. (Lipset enjoyed a second CASBS fellowship during 1972–73.) More than sixty years after its publication in 1959, Lipset’s seminal article remains one of the most frequently cited works among economists and political scientists who continue to debate the exact relationship between capitalist development and political democracy. Although Lipset is best known for his contributions to modernization theory, I also admire his comparative-analytical research on political culture, behavior, and institutions in the United States and Canada. Long before Lipset became famous for his research at Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia universities, his teaching career actually began at my undergraduate alma mater, the University of Toronto, where he completed his PhD dissertation on the political origins of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the agrarian socialist movement that later became Canada’s New Democratic Party. Consequently, Lipset had a more astute understanding of Canadian politics than any other American political scientist of his generation, and his 1990 book, Continental Divide, remains one of the best comparative-historical analysis of the distinctive political cultures of the United States and Canada.
The other ‘ghost’ in my study is Juan José Linz (1926–2013), a German-born Spanish sociologist and political scientist who held a visiting fellowship at CASBS in 1963-64. Over the course of his storied career, Juan Linz was one of the pre-eminent scholars of the breakdown of democracy in interwar Europe, the rise of authoritarian regimes in Spain and Latin America after World War Two, the democratization of authoritarian regimes in Spain and Latin America after 1975, and the quality of democratic institutions and practices in Latin America, Spain, and the United States after 1990. Linz’s deeply held normative preference for democratic institutions and practices was motivated by his family background and lived experiences. He was born in Weimar Germany to Spanish parents, who escaped and fled to Spain on the eve of the Germany’s democratic breakdown in 1933. Seeking refuge from Hitler’s Germany, the young Juan Linz then lived through the 1936 breakdown of the Spanish Republic and the devastating civil war that claimed more than 200,000 Spanish lives between 1936 and 1939. Another 200,000 Spaniards died from political violence and repression during the decades-long dictatorship that followed the Spanish civil war. These conditions prompted Juan Linz’ relocation to New York City, where he completed his PhD in sociology at Columbia University in 1959. Over the course of his storied career (mostly at Yale University), Linz taught three of the professors who supervised my doctoral research at the University of Notre Dame: Guillermo O’Donnell (himself a 2001–02 CASBS fellow), Michael Coppege, and Robert Fishman. My professors at Notre Dame would often share stories about their interactions with the deep-thinking and chain-smoking Juan Linz, who I came to regard as my ‘grand’ professor. His story always resonated with me, in part because my first political memories are those of violence and repression following the military coup that toppled Nigeria’s Second Republic on December 31, 1983. Having lived in an African country with significant democratic deficits that stem from its long history of repeated democratic breakdowns, my research on the developmental legacies of colonialism is partly shaped by Linz’s extensive scholarship on authoritarianism, democratization, and democratic deficiencies in Latin America. Much of this research was co-authored with Alfred Stepan (1936–2017), who also attended the University of Notre Dame during the 1950s.
Throughout his career, Juan Linz was a strong critic of the winner-takes-all nature of American-style ‘presidential democracy.’ In fact, one of his last public interviews, published in the Washington Post on January 22, 2013, highlighted his deep concerns about rising political polarization and the impending crisis of American democracy. Sadly, Linz passed away on October 1, 2013, I’d like to think with a cigarette in his hand. I miss his political writing, but I’m glad he did not live to see the political rise of Donald Trump and the recent turn toward electoral authoritarianism in the United States. I’m sure he would be terrified by the current state of American affairs, as is anyone who has had to flee from political repression, violence, or the breakdown of democracy in their home country.
As I reflect on my fellowship year at CASBS, I am humbled and honored to write in the same office that was once used by Seymour Lipset and Juan Linz, and I would like to dedicate my writing this year to their memories. And I remain hopeful that the United States will one day return to the democratic ideals that it once espoused during their lifetimes.
