Kenneth George YoungFAcSSFRHistS (3 January 1943 – 20 February 2019)[1][2][3] was a British political scientist and historian who was Professor of Public Policy atKing's College London in itsDepartment of War Studies.[4] Earlier he was instrumental in the creation of the Department of Political Economy at KCL in 2010, and was its founding head of department.[2]
Educated at theLondon School of Economics, Young was a research officer with the influentialGreater London Group during his time there. Young taught at several institutions prior to coming to KCL, including theUniversity of Kent at Canterbury; theUniversity of Bristol, where he was a founding editor of the interdisciplinary-oriented journalPolicy & Politics and where the annual Ken Young Best Paper Prize is named after him; theUniversity of Birmingham, where he was director of the Institute of Local Government Studies; and atQueen Mary and Westfield College of theUniversity of London, where he was head of the Department of Politics and Vice-Principal. Young is most known for his work inurban studies andpolicy studies, specially with regard tolocal government in England. He was also involved in theevidence-based policy movement, including serving as director of theEconomic and Social Research Council's UK Centre for Evidence Based Policy and Practice and co-founding the journalEvidence & Policy.
He served on several governmental bodies, in particular being director of research for the Widdicombe Committee during 1985–86. Late in his career, he shifted his focus towardssecurity studies and became ahistorian of the early Cold War. One of his journal articles in that field was awarded a Moncado Prize by theSociety for Military History.
Young was fromChristchurch,Hampshire (nowDorset), born to a working-class family for whom education was not a priority.[3] He left school at age 15, withoutany qualifications.[3] After enlisting in theRoyal Air Force, he was stationed atRAF Halton as an armament engineer, but back problems cut his service short.[3] When he returned home, he obtained tutoring in several subjects by a local librarian, and was able to gainA-level qualifications.[3]
With those qualifications Young gained admission to theLondon School of Economics, from which he earned bachelor's and master's degrees.[5]
While pursuing his doctoral studies, Young was a research officer with theGreater London Group, a research centre – led byWilliam A. Robson – within LSE for the study of London government,[6] in the late 1960s.[7] One later history has used Young as an example of a researcher from the group who went on to "academic fame".[6]
Young also taught in the sociology department atGoldsmiths' College before coming back to LSE and serving as a research officer with the Department of Government.[5] He then completed his PhD thesis, entitledThe London municipal society 1894–1963: a study in Conservatism and local government, under the supervision ofGeorge W. Jones, and was awarded his doctorate from LSE in 1974.[8]
In 1974, Young became aresearch fellow at theUniversity of Kent at Canterbury.[5] In the same year he became co-editor with Bleddyn Davies of the academic journalPolicy & Politics, which the two of them had been instrumental in forming two years earlier while at LSE.[9] The goal of the journal was to provide an interdisciplinary approach to the study of local government.[9] Young's networking skills were crucial in recruiting academics from around the world, including future Nobel Prize winnerElinor Ostrom, to publish articles for the new journal.[10]
Young's first book, a revised version of his dissertation, was published asLocal politics and the rise of party: the London municipal society and the conservative intervention in local elections, 1894-1963 byLeicester University Press in 1975.[2]
By the late 1970s he had moved to theUniversity of Bristol, where he was affiliated with that institution's School for Advanced Urban Studies.[9] Under Young's guidance,Policy & Politics found a permanent home at Bristol, in what eventually became thePolicy Press.[10] He remained Managing Editor of the journal until 1980.[9] Young also joined thePolicy Studies Institute in 1980,[4] where he was a senior fellow.[11]
Young then became professor at theUniversity of Birmingham in 1987,[4] where he was also director of the Institute of Local Government Studies.[12] Much of Young's research during the 1980s focused how local governments could realise equal opportunity policies.[12] One such effort was a joint conference and study project with American sociologistNathan Glazer, that sought to compare British and American approaches towards that goal.[11] An evaluation inAmerican Political Science Review of the resulting book of conference papers assessed the British contributions as superior to the American ones and criticised Glazer's portrayal of U.S. racial history in particular.[13]
In 1990, Young was named as Professor of Politics[14] and head of the Department of Politics atQueen Mary and Westfield College of theUniversity of London.[4][15] He was appointed Vice-Principal there in 1992,[16] a position he held for six years.[4] He was also involved in publicising research on authoritarianism to a general audience.[17] Of his 1997 bookLocal Government since 1945, written withNirmala Rao, one popular text included it in a bibliography as a "useful postwar review" of the subject.[18]
In connection with the movement forevidence-based policy, from 2000 to 2005 Young was director of theEconomic and Social Research Council's UK Centre for Evidence Based Policy and Practice.[4] The centre was located at first within Queen Mary[19] and then within King's College London.[20] Additionally, Young was a founding editor in 2005 ofEvidence & Policy, an interdisciplinary journal covering the relationship between research evidence and public policy.[21]
In 2005, Young himself went to KCL as Professor of Public Policy.[4] His charge was to bring into being postgraduate programmes in public policy, which included establishment of a master's in the subject as well as the creation of the Institute for the Study of Public Policy.[2] That institute eventually transformed into the Department of Political Economy in 2010; Young remained its head until January 2013.[2]
Young was known for his teaching, which he did over a span of 50 years.[4] He did not focus his attentions so much on superior students, but rather sought to assist and engage those who were struggling for one reason or another.[3]
Young was on the staff of theUniversity of Bolton's Centre for Opposition Studies.[22]
Young's work in public policy has been influential and frequently cited.Policy & Politics journal awards an annual Ken Young Best Paper Prize, in recognition of Young's "innovative ideas and determination to put interdisciplinary analysis of and for policy firmly on the academic map in the UK and beyond."[9] The bibliography ofGerry Stoker's 1991 textbookThe Politics of Local Government has ten separate listings for Young's books, articles, and reports.[23] The 2002 journal article "Social science and the evidence-based policy movement", of which Young was the lead author and which sought to address the problem that "there remains some confusion about what evidence-based policy making actually means", has been cited over 325 times.[24] Young's narrative histories have also been praised as very readable.[23][25]
Upon his death, a KCL notice said that Young "understood that institutions embody ideas and may be our most enduring legacy. The Department of Political Economy at King's College London embodied Ken's belief in the value of interdisciplinary scholarship dedicated to the study of public policy and is an important part of his legacy."[2] Bleddyn Davies wrote that Young had a "gift for getting to the right place at the right time", and that this was a key factor in Young's effectiveness in a new and growing field.[10]
Young had positions related to public affairs on a number of occasions. He served as Specialist Advisor to the House of Commons Select Committee on Environment in 1982–83.[14]
Young then served as director of research to the Committee of Inquiry into the Conduct of Local Authority Business, known as the Widdicombe Committee, during 1985–86.[14] As director, Young made the case for local government, as opposed to centralisation, being better able to innovate, maximise the value of public choice, and lead to public participation and pluralism.[23] While not all agreed with the conclusions of the Widdicombe Committee's report,City of Westminster chief executiveRodney Brooke wrote that it "present[s] the most extensive and authoritative examination of the internal workings of local government for two decades."[26] Brooke also stated that Young's essay in the report was a "fascinating" piece.[26] Others too have praised the level and quality of research that went into the Widdicombe Report.[23]
In a follow-on report done in 1990 for theJoseph Rowntree Foundation to examine changes in municipal government since Widdicombe, Young and his colleague Mary Davies found that local councils were putting adherence to partisan politics ahead of the interests of the general public.[27] In further work done for the Rowntree Foundation during 1993–94, Young and Rao explored the dissatisfactions oflocal councillors who were frustrated by slow, cumbersome processes overly influenced by party politics and leading to them departing office,[28] and the slow rate at which the percentage of women who were councillors was increasing.[29]
Young was a Commissioner of theLocal Government Boundary Commission between 1990 and 1992.[30]
Beginning in the 2000s, Young began researching and writing in a different area, what he termed "the politics of defence in the early Cold War", with articles inThe Journal of Military History, theJournal of Cold War Studies, and similar academic publications.[4]
The first such article was "The Royal Navy's Polaris lobby, 1955–62", published in theJournal of Strategic Studies in 2002 while he was still at Queen Mary.[31] It concerned theUnited Kingdom's Polaris programme, and through archival research showed that contrary to past interpretations, theAdmiralty had actively sought a submarine-launched ballistic missile capability and the deterrent role that went along with it and that the programme represented "a naval triumph in terms of Whitehall politics and inter-service competition."[32] Many of his other articles also focused on the British role in nuclear deployments during the early Cold War period, and the evolution of theBritish independent nuclear deterrent.[2]
Several of the themes of this research were encapsulated in Young's 2016 bookThe American Bomb in Britain: US Air Forces' Strategic Presence, 1946–64, which provided both an operational and a political history of theStrategic Air Command in the United Kingdom.[25]
Young died in February 2019.[2]
His final book was published posthumously in February 2020 (copyright date 2019):Super Bomb: Organizational Conflict and the Development of the Hydrogen Bomb concerned the decision by the US government toproceed with development of the hydrogen bomb and the ramifications of that decision for several years after. Young's work made use of extensive, previously unused interviews with virtually all the major participants in the decision conducted in the mid-1950s by Columbia University professorWarner R. Schilling.[33] A review inForeign Affairs characterized Young's effort as having produced "a compelling book" that presented "a fresh look at the defeat" of those opposing the weapon,[34] while a review for theAssociation of College and Research Libraries assessed the book as being "well written, cogently argued, and deeply researched."[35]
Young was elected to the Fellowship of theRoyal Historical Society.[36] He was also aFellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.[37]
In 2014,Policy & Politics journal began awarding an annual Ken Young Best Paper Prize, given to one article published in the previous year's volume that was most "judged to represent excellence in the field".[9]
Young's article "Special Weapon, Special Relationship: The Atomic Bomb Comes to Britain", published inThe Journal of Military History, was awarded a 2014 Moncado Prize by theSociety for Military History.[38]
