Merwin Crawford Young (November 7, 1931 – January 22, 2020) was an American political scientist and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Young became an assistant professor at Wisconsin in 1963, and published his first major work, Politics in the Congo: Decolonization and Independence.
He became prominent as the author in 1976 of the highly influential The Politics of Cultural Pluralism, which was awarded the Herskovits Prize by the African Studies Association.
His 1994 book, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective, won the Lubbert Prize from the American Political Science Association as the best book written that year in the field of Comparative Politics.
He retired in 2001 as a full professor but remained active in his field, publishing "The End of the Postcolonial State in Africa?"