Louise Overacker

Louise Overacker (November 18, 1891—April 26, 1982) was an American political scientist. She specialized in the study of money in politics, United States presidential primaries, and comparative party systems, particularly those of Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. She was one of the first professors to teach government at Wellesley College, where she was a faculty member from 1925 until 1957, and helped to establish the Wellesley Department of Political Science in 1940.

Education and early work Overacker was born in Centreville (now Fremont), in the East Bay area around San Francisco, California. Her father owned a fruit growing business, but he later became a rancher, and the family moved to St. Helena, California, where Overacker attended high school. Wellesley College has credited Overacker with playing a leading role in introducing a serious concentration on political science into the Wellesley history department, as well as in the subsequent founding of the political science department in 1940. When her former undergraduate advisor Victor J. West died in 1927, Overacker was invited to compile his lectures and notes into a book, which she published under the title Money in Elections in 1932. In 1945, Overacker was invited by Boston University to deliver the Gaspar G. Bacon lecture series; Victoria Schuck wrote that it was rare for a woman to be invited to deliver a named lecture series at that time. Because of Overacker's early work on the topic of campaign finance, she was chosen by the Citizen's Research Foundation as one of the namesakes for their Overacker-Heard Campaign Finance Data Archive, later maintained by the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1951, Overacker was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

In 1952, Overacker published The Australian party system. The book aimed to increase American interest in the party politics of Australia, specifically the relationship between the Australian Labor Party, the parties of the center-right, and the Communist Party of Australia. As a scholar of the American presidential primary system, Overacker was particularly interested in the pre-selection process in Australian presidential politics, which she viewed as the closest foreign analogue to American presidential primary elections.

Overacker retired from Wellesley in 1957, 32 years after her first appointment there.

Selected works Primary Elections, 2nd edition, with Charles Merriam (1928) Money in Elections, expanded from notes by Victor J. West (1932) Presidential Campaign Funds (1946) The Australian party system (1952)

Selected awards John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 1951 Namesake, Overacker-Heard Campaign Finance Data Archive