William Harrison Riker, one of the founders of the Public Choice Society, arguably transformed the discipline of Political Science more than any single individual in the last half-century, creating the possibility of a genuine science of politics. It is difficult to measure the relative importance of his own scholarship, the vision of the scientific enterprise he imposed on the discipline, the training he gave a new generation of scholars, and the integration of this new understanding of political science into the social sciences. Each on their own was a legacy few achieve. Collectively, his contributions are, like the man himself, peerless.
This chapter is a revised and updated version of an essay that first appeared in The Encyclopedia of Public Choice edited by Charles K. Rowley and Friedrich Schneider and published in 2004 by Kluwer Academic Publishers, Volume I, pp. 321–324.
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Aldrich, J.H. (2008). William H. Riker (1920–1993). In: Readings in Public Choice and Constitutional Political Economy. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-75870-1_10
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