Ken Young

Kenneth George Young FAcSS FRHistS (3 January 1943 – 20 February 2019) Earlier he was instrumental in the creation of the Department of Political Economy at KCL in 2010, and was its founding head of department. He left school at age 15, without any qualifications.

While pursuing his doctoral studies, Young was a research officer with the Greater London Group, a research centre – led by William A. Robson – within LSE for the study of London government, in the late 1960s. One later history has used Young as an example of a researcher from the group who went on to "academic fame".

Academic career in public policy In 1974, Young became a research fellow at the University of Kent at Canterbury. The goal of the journal was to provide an interdisciplinary approach to the study of local government.

Young's first book, a revised version of his dissertation, was published as Local politics and the rise of party: the London municipal society and the conservative intervention in local elections, 1894-1963 by Leicester University Press in 1975. Much of Young's research during the 1980s focused how local governments could realise equal opportunity policies. An evaluation in American 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.

In 1990, Young was named as Professor of Politics He was appointed Vice-Principal there in 1992, a position he held for six years. Of his 1997 book Local Government since 1945, written with Nirmala Rao, one popular text included it in a bibliography as a "useful postwar review" of the subject.

In connection with the movement for evidence-based policy, from 2000 to 2005 Young was director of the Economic and Social Research Council's UK Centre for Evidence Based Policy and Practice. and then within King's College London. Additionally, Young was a founding editor in 2005 of Evidence & Policy, an interdisciplinary journal covering the relationship between research evidence and public policy.

In 2005, Young himself went to KCL as Professor of Public Policy.

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." 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. Young's narrative histories have also been praised as very readable. 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. Brooke also stated that Young's essay in the report was a "fascinating" piece. In further work done for the Rowntree Foundation during 1993–94, Young and Rao explored the dissatisfactions of local councillors who were frustrated by slow, cumbersome processes overly influenced by party politics and leading to them departing office, and the slow rate at which the percentage of women who were councillors was increasing.

Young was a Commissioner of the Local Government Boundary Commission between 1990 and 1992.

Cold War historian

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 in The Journal of Military History, the Journal of Cold War Studies, and similar academic publications. It concerned the United Kingdom's Polaris programme, and through archival research showed that contrary to past interpretations, the Admiralty 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." Many of his other articles also focused on the British role in nuclear deployments during the early Cold War period, and the evolution of the British independent nuclear deterrent.

Young died in February 2019.

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 to proceed 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 professor Warner R. Schilling. A review in Foreign Affairs characterized Young's effort as having produced "a compelling book" that presented "a fresh look at the defeat" of those opposing the weapon, while a review for the Association of College and Research Libraries assessed the book as being "well written, cogently argued, and deeply researched."

Awards and honors Young was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Historical Society. He was also a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

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".

Published works

Books Local politics and the rise of party: The London municipal society and the conservative intervention in local elections, 1894–1963 (Leicester University Press, 1975) Essays on the Study of Urban Politics (Springer, 1975) [editor] Strategy and conflict in metropolitan housing: Suburbia versus the Greater London Council, 1965–75 (Heinemann, 1978) [co-author with John Kramer] Policy and Practice in the Multi-Racial City (Policy Studies Institute, 1981) [co-author with Naomi Connelly] Metropolitan London: Politics and Urban Change 1837–1981 (Edward Arnold, 1982) [co-author with Patricia L. Garside] Ethnic Pluralism and Public Policy: Achieving Equality in the United States and Britain (Heinemann, D. C. Heath, 1983) [co-editor with Nathan Glazer] Managing the Post-Industrial City (Heinemann, 1983) [co-author with Liz Mills] National Interests and Local Government (Ashgate, 1983) [editor] Urban economic development: New roles and relationships (Macmillan, 1983) [co-editor with Charlie Mason] The London Employment Problem (Clarendon Press, 1986) [co-author with Nick Buck and Ian Gordon] Abolition: the reform of metropolitan government in England 1983–86; a review and bibliography (Letchworth: Technical Communications, 1987) [co-author with Lesley Grayson] Creating a Responsive Public Service (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990) [co-author with Roger Hadley] Local Government since 1945 (Blackwell Publishing, 1997) [co-author with Nirmala Rao] The American Bomb in Britain: US Air Forces' Strategic Presence, 1946–64 (Manchester University Press, 2016) Super Bomb: Organizational Conflict and the Development of the Hydrogen Bomb (Cornell University Press, 2019) [co-author with Warner R. Schilling]

Selected articles, chapters, and reports "Lessons of the London government reforms" (Greater London Group, 1968) "'Values' in the Policy Process", Policy & Politics Vol. 5, No. 3 (1977) "Public policy research: a review of qualitative methods (Social Science Research Council, 1980) [co-author with Liz Mills] "Urban governments and economic change" (Social Science Research Council, 1980) [co-author with Charles Mason and Liz Mills] "Ethnic record keeping in local authorities: a discussion paper" (Policy Studies Institute, 1981) [co-author with Naomi Connelly] "Widdicombe from the researcher's angle", Local Government Studies Vol. 12, No. 6 (1986) "The management of doctoral studies in the social sciences" (Policy Studies Institute, 1987) [co-author with Michael Patrick Fogarty and Susan McRae] "The politics of local government since Widdicombe" (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1990) [co-author with Mary Davies] "Future of county government" (Policy Studies Institute, 1990) "Approaches to Policy Development in the Field of Equal Opportunities", in Wendy Ball and John Solomos (eds.) Race and Local Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 1990) "Breaking down the barriers: Women Managers in Local Government" (Local Government Management Board, 1991) [co-author with Liz Spencer] "Coming to terms with change? The local government councillor in 1993" (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1994) [co-author with Nirmala Rao] "Reinventing Local Government? Some Evidence Assessed", Public Administration Vol. 74, No. 3 (1996) "Social Science and the Evidence-based Policy Movement", Social Policy and Society Vol. 1, No. 3 (2002) [co-author with Deborah Ashby, Annette Boaz, and Lesley Grayson] "The Royal Navy's Polaris lobby, 1955–62", Journal of Strategic Studies Vol. 25, No. 3 (2002) "US 'atomic capability' and the British forward bases in the early Cold War", Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 42, No. 1 (2007) "Special Weapon, Special Relationship: The Atomic Bomb Comes to Britain", Journal of Military History Vol. 77, No. 2 (2013) "Revisiting NSC-68", Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 15, No. 1 (2013) "The Hydrogen Bomb, Lewis L. Strauss and the Writing of Nuclear History", Journal of Strategic Studies Vol. 36, No. 6 (2013) "Cold War Insecurities, and the Curious Case of John Strachey", Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 29, No. 6 (2014)