Political scientist Sidney Verba dead at 86
Sidney Verba, one of the world’s most prominent political scientists, taught at Harvard for 35 years, holding several key administrative posts and leaving a lasting influence beyond the classroom. He died Monday at his home in Cambridge at the age of 86. Verba, who was the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor Emeritus and research professor of government, undertook pioneering research on democratic participation, civic life, and political inequality. He wrote more than 20 books that examined citizen engagement and activism in democratic political life in the U.S. and around the world. His work, done in collaboration with many scholars over five decades, showed that people with higher income and education levels tended to be more active in civic and political life, revealing, in groundbreaking studies, that political inequality is deeply embedded in American society. “He was one of the greatest political scientists of the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of...