RIP, George Rabinowitz

The UNC political science department lost a valued faculty member, colleague, and friend this weekend. George Rabinowitz, Burton Craige Distinguished Professor, died suddenly of a heart attack on Friday in Norway, where he was spending a semester. (Prof. Rabinowitz was elected member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Science and Letters in 2003, and frequently spent time teaching and researching in that country.)

I TA'd for Prof. Rabinowitz last semester, and can testify to his dedication to rigor in his teaching. He had a similar discipline in his research. He is probably best known for developing the directional model of issue voting, which complicated traditional proximity voting models, but contributed many other notable works as well. He served on the editorial board of AJPS and JoP. Here is his CV. Here is his seminal APSR paper on directional theory, with Stuart Macdonald. Here is a Google search on directional theory, which gets 163,000 hits.

He is survived by his wife Stuart Macdonald, also a UNC political science professor, and several children.