[2] Caraley was born in New York City in 1932 and graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School.
[4] Caraley was a founding director of Columbia University's Graduate Program in Public Policy and served as Chairman of the Barnard College Department of Political Science for thirty years.
[5] He has been Editor of the Political Science Quarterly for more than thirty-five years, a position he held until his death.
He has published numerous books and articles on various aspects of American politics including city government, congressional policies toward cities, national security policy, as well as democratic political theory and ethics.
Caraley's other field of interest is "Democratic Political Theory and Ethics," in which he wrote an article "Elections and Dilemmas of American Democratic Governance," that was reprinted in Promise and Problems of Old and New Democracies, edited by Xiaobo Lü (2000).