Gosnell attended the University of Rochester, graduating summa cum laude in 1918.
During World War II, he went to Washington, D.C., as a budget analyst and later as an operations officer for the United States Department of State, while he continued to study and write on politics.
[1][2] A student of political scientist Charles Edward Merriam, Gosnell published work in the 1920s that pioneered new approaches using psychology to examine voting and political behavior.
[1] His dissertation on New York politics, Thomas C. Platt ("Boss" Platt) and Theodore Roosevelt was published, and then Non-voting, Causes and Methods of Control (1924, with Merriam) and Getting out the Vote: An Experiment in the Stimulation of Voting (1927).
[3] In the 1930s, he also wrote about machine politics in Chicago, and then in the 1960s revised his work in this area.