Career Achievement Award

Larry Bartels

Vanderbilt University

Over a career of nearly 40 years, Larry has fundamentally challenged, altered, and increased our understanding of voters, elections, media, representation, nominations, inequality, and democracy.  In doing so, he worked to preserve and maintain the world’s longest-standing collection of political data as Chair of the American National Election Studies Board of Advisers. He has advanced knowledge about survey methodology and the analysis of survey data.  His work combines a keen eye for inferential challenges, the technical knowhow to develop and deploy statistical models to overcome these challenges, and a deep sensitivity to what might go wrong when models are applied to real-world politics.   This makes him a true political methodologist; one who focuses on methodological issues that are consequential for science, but also when putting science in to practice, he uses his tools in ways that respect the politics of the problem.

Larry’s career includes contributions to scholarship that sit in parallel to publicly engaged scientific work influencing public discourse and policy about political and income inequality, representation, electoral institutions, and the functioning and health of democracy.   The broad influence of Larry's work has been recognized by the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Science, all which have elected him a fellow.

Larry has produced work that shapes the way scholars approach measurement, data analysis, and inference. He has made important contributions to the way we think about instrumental variables estimators (AJPS 1991) and he was an early adopter of model averaging (AJPS 1997). His paper on panel attrition and panel conditioning in ANES data (Political Analysis, 2000) remains one of the best pieces ever authored on the topic.  Papers like “Messages Received” (APSR 1993), “Information Effects” (AJPS 1996) and “Constituency Opinion and Congressional Policy Making: the Reagan Defense Buildup” (APSR 1991) demonstrate his ability to extract a tremendous amount of substantive insight from his extraordinary ability to tailor a statistical model to the problem and the data at hand.

In 1989, Larry’s book Presidential Primaries and the Dynamics of Public Choice won the Woodrow Wilson Prize, the best book award from the American Political Science Association.  Nearly two decades later, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (2008) won both the APSA’s Gladys M. Kammerer Award and the Leon Epstein Award. Former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have spoken publicly about the importance of Larry’s work on inequality and democracy to their understanding of our time. In 2020, this public acknowledgement resulted in no less than the $1600.00 clue on the popular game show Jeopardy! about one of Larry’s books – under the category “President Obama’s reading list.”

An early and active member of the Society, Larry has played an important role in the development of the Society, the field of political methodology, and so many of its members.   He was the Society’s fifth president (1993-1995). Larry has been a mentor as Ph.D. or post-doctoral advisor to scholars such as Simon Jackman, Guy Whitten, Jonathan Ladd, Gabe Lenz, and Lynn Vavreck. The centers that he helped foster at both Princeton and Vanderbilt continue to provide important career-launching opportunities for promising young analysts of politics.

For all of these accomplishments, we are honored to bestow the Society for Political Methodology's 2021 Career Achievement Award upon Larry Bartels.

Selection committee: Jeff Lewis (UCLA, chair), Fredrick Boehmke (Iowa), and Michael Ward (Duke)

Howard Rosenthal

New York University

We are pleased to announce that Howard Rosenthal is the recipient of the 2020 Society for Political Methodology Career Achievement award. In a career spanning more than 50 years and going strong, Rosenthal has been a foundational figure in the empirical testing of theoretical models (EITM) developing innovative approaches to the study of spatial voting, ideology, and revealed preference among other important areas of research.   His work integrates the theoretical insights of positive political economy with novel empirical methods yielding results and approaches that have become canonical in the study of legislatures, policy-making, and elections.

The author of 10 books and well over 100 articles in the fields of Political Science, Economics, and Sociology and the dissertation supervisor to scholars such as Susanne Lohmann, Nolan McCarty, and Adam Bonica, Rosenthal's impact on the discipline and the use of sophisticated quantitative research in it has been expansive and profound.

A few examples of the breadth and depth of Rosenthal's contributions include: articles with Thomas Romer on the testing of spatial models of voting and voting on referendums; books and articles with Keith Poole (and others) developing and deploying methodologies for the measurement of ideology and preference (including NOMINATE); papers, a book and a monograph with David Hildibrand and James Laing on predictive analysis and the analysis of categorical variables; articles with Tom Palfrey on the empirical testing of game-theoretic models of voting; and papers and a book with Alberto Alesina contributing to the study of divided government, partisan business cycles, and polarization.

A central through-line in Rosenthal's work has been to attack enduring and difficult questions in political science and economics by developing and deploying both new cutting-edge theoretical and methodological tools that push the frontier of the possible and advance our understanding in so doing.

For all of these accomplishments, we are honored to bestow the Society for Political Methodology's 2020 Career Achievement Award upon Howard Rosenthal.

Selection committee: Jeff Lewis (UCLA, chair), Fredrick Boehmke (Iowa), and Michael Ward (Duke)

Phillip Schrodt

Parus Analytics

We are pleased to announce that Philip Schrodt is the recipient of the 2019 Society for Political Methodology Career Achievement award.

Phil was an early pioneer in the subfield of text as data and a pioneer in the use of quantitive methods in international relations. He has been a prolific scholar having published more that 90 papers. His research has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the U.S. government’s multi-agency Political Instability Task Force. He is an inaugural fellow of the Society.

He is best known as the leader of the Computational Event Data System that employs automated coding of English-language news reports to generate political event data focusing on the Middle East, Balkans, and West Africa. These data are used in statistical early warning models to predict political change. The twenty-five-year project was originally based in the Department of Political Science at the University of Kansas where it was known as the Kansas Event Data System (KEDS) project. The KEDS project was one of the first independently developed political science software packages, and won the “Outstanding Computer Software Award” from the American Political Science Association in 1995.

In addition to his important research contributions, Phil has always been an outstanding citizen of the political methodology community. He has served in various leadership roles in the Society for Political Methodology, including president (2007-2009), vice-president (2005-2007), and treasurer. He also served on the advisory board of the Correlates of War Project (2009 - 2013) and helped to co-develop Northwestern University’s mathematical methods in the social sciences.

Since leaving Penn State for private consulting Phil’s research has focused on predicting political change using statistical and pattern recognition methods.

Selection committee: Jonathan N. Katz (Caltech), Neal Beck (NYU), Jeff Lewis (UCLA), and John Londregan (Princeton)

Michael D. Ward

Duke University

Mike’s enormous career achievements and contributions stand out in three dimensions: (1) his pioneering work in several methodological areas (estimation of dynamics; observational dependence, especially spatial and network interdependence; out-of-sample forecasting; and statistical graphics, for examples); (2) the early, sustained, and great effects his methodological contributions have had on the subfields of international relations and comparative politics, especially in the democratic peace literature; and (3) his years of service to the discipline in all capacities, but most importantly as a teacher and mentor.

Mike has published more than 120 scholarly articles across the disciplines of political science, statistics, geography, and economics. His methodological work and its application to the study of conflict and peace continues to transform international relations. His early work on dependencies in arms races and the political economy of defense spending advanced and shaped the field, and his more recent investigations of higher-order dependencies in international conflict data have continued to press the field to pay more attention to dynamics and (inter)dependence, temporal and spatial. Furthermore, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he introduced IR scholars to non-constant parameters and sliding-window regression.

Mike has also been a pioneer in the graphical display of data, including having produced two films displaying change over time in the international system (one using COPDAB data, the other using Polity). He has recently developed a new way of visualizing the predictive performance of binary classifiers: the separation plot. Mike’s work and focus on out-of-sample forecasts and performance as alternatives standards to hypothesis-test significance or experimental-result retrieval has also been very much needed and critically important to empirical social-science. Mike’s most-influential line of work was his sustained exploration of observational (inter)dependence. Whereas most other political methodologists and econometricians have made important contributions by devising clever corrections for this “nuisance,” Mike always (rightly) recognized and emphasized that this dependence among observations, especially nations in the international relations and comparative politics of his substantive focuses, is a fundamental feature of the social world, one that should be explored and modeled directly. Mike has continued to develop and apply the next generation of spatial-statistical and dynamic network models for capturing the inherent dependence among nations (and social actors more generally). Michael Ward is a brilliant, innovative, cross-disciplinary scholar, collaborator, and teacher: a political methodologist most-deserving of the Society’s Career Achievement Award.

Selection committee: Jay Goodliffe (Brigham Young, Chair), Cassy Dorff (New Mexico), Justin Esarey (Rice), Alex Tahk (Wisconsin-Madison), Rocio Titiunik (Michigan), Curt Signorino (Rochester), Betsy Sinclair (Washington), Teppei Yamamoto (MIT)

Robert Erikson

Columbia University

Bob has been a trailblazer in the application of quantitative methods for studying questions that are central to the fields of public opinion, political behavior, and political representation, over a career that spans 50 years. He started in 1967 as Assistant Professor at Florida State, where he spent his first 11-12 years.  Bob then moved to Houston, via WashU St Louis, for 21-22 years until 1999, and since the turn of the century he has been at Columbia. He has served as editor of both Political Analysis (2003-2007) and the American Journal of Political Science (1982-1984). Bob was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007. 

Bob has written several seminal pieces that have set and reset research agendas in the study of public opinion and elections, made possible by deep engagement with sophisticated quantitative methods. For example, his early work in the 1970s on the incumbency advantage pointed out selection/reverse causation problems that had been unnoticed, and essentially started a literature in American politics that not only continues to this day, but has extended to comparative politics. The methodological issues Bob pointed out in 1971 are still the issues that everyone grapples with today. His work with Wright and McIver on public opinion in the states highlighted important issues in the measurement of public opinion and ideology at the state level, and his work on macro politics with MacKuen and Stimson has been enormously influential. 

His publication record is astounding, including an incredible 14 articles in the discipline's flagship journal. According to his Google Scholar page, Bob's work currently has 15,855 citations, with an h-index of 51 (i.e., Bob has published 51 papers/books with at least 51 citations each). To list just those over 1,000 cites: The Macro Polity with MacKuen & Stimson has 1811;  Statehouse Democracy with Wright & McIver has 1637; Dynamic Representation and Peasants or Bankers, both in APSR’s top-list, have 1462 and 1035 respectively. And American Public Opinion, with Kent Tedin is in its 9th edition, and also has around 1000 google cites. 

Bob's work has been versatile and dynamic, and he shows no sign of slowing down.  He continues to make important contributions as his career enters now its fifth decade.  He has not stopped innovating, recently embracing for instance some of the causal inference tools that have become popular in political science of late to address questions that have long been part of his agenda: He has used regression discontinuity designs to study the incumbency advantage and gubernatorial coattails; he has delved into randomization-inference methods; he has used natural experiments and instrumental variables methods to study political attitudes. Bob is a scholar who has been at the cutting edge for five decades. 

Bob has been an outstanding citizen of the political methodology community: he has always been an advocate for young and female scholars in our field, and generous with his time and advice. He is a constant constructive and positive presence in political methodology conferences in the U.S. and abroad. 

In sum, Bob Erikson, on the strength of so many great past and present contributions to political methodology and to the political-methodology community is so very deserving of this Career Award, the Society for Political Methodology’s highest distinction that comes with our very greatest appreciation.

Selection committee: Robert Franzese (Michigan, chair), Lonna Atkeson (New Mexico), Koskue Imai (Princeton), Simon Jackman (Sydney) and Wendy Tam Cho (Illinois)

Keith Poole

University of Georgia

In a career spanning four decades, Keith Poole's contributions to Political Methodology, indeed to Political Science and the study of American politics, have had enormous impact. The work is widely read and cited (north of 14,000 Google cites, which probably understates greatly given that many use NOMINATE data without citing their source), and his contributions have revolutionized the political methodology and provide a foundational bedrock for American institutional research. He is best known for his research on measurement models, especially the NOMINATE model co-developed with Howard Rosenthal that revolutionized the manner in which political scientists measure and think about ideology. One can say perfectly correctly, and without any hyperbole: the modern study of the U.S. Congress would be simply unthinkable without NOMINATE legislative-roll-call-voting scores. NOMINATE has produced data that entire bodies of our discipline—and many in the press—have relied on to understand the U.S. Congress. His Voteview website provides both academics and journalists and the general public a way to interrogate his measures of ideological placement of U.S. politicians across time.
 
NOMINATE (short for "Nominal Three-Step Estimation") is a procedure Keith began working on in the 1980s to estimate with computational efficiency the spatial structure of Congress, placing both members and roll-call votes in multidimensional space. Using technology available in 1988-89, Keith was able to compute two-dimensional D-NOMINATE scores for the first 100 terms of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. He subsequently worked to create revised versions of the NOMINATE method and now has several forms of these data available. Keith's data—not only NOMINATE scores but also comprehensive archives of congressional roll call votes—have been freely available online since August 1995. In this way, the nature of Keith's work in the late 1970s foreshadowed many of the things that we now take for granted in the methodology community –  a world in which political scientists would be skilled in statistical computation, with estimates from that computation accessible and replicable by anyone. Notably, even at a time when many were not willing to share data when asked, Keith had his data on display online and made it freely accessible for any interested person to download. In building the NOMINATE enterprise, he wrote software that was distributed freely to the community, allowing researchers to port these techniques to other settings. He also prepared and distributed roll call data from each U.S. Congress, while producing estimates of DW-NOMINATE scores every two years as well as replication code to reproduce those estimates. The upkeep of the data, the refining of the methods, and the maintenance of the website have all been as invaluable as the method. Over the past three decades, NOMINATE has been a model research agenda in political methodology, spawning a range of substantive and methodological extensions. On the methodological side, researchers have extended the NOMINATE model to incorporate Bayesian estimation techniques, to applications involving Big Data, and to produce valid ideal point estimates across time and institutions. On the substantive side, other scholars have ported these methods to different settings and data sets, such as the Supreme Court and the European Parliament. The substantive contribution that NOMINATE is perhaps best known for is one in which Keith has published extensively himself – the study of political polarization in American politics, not only one of the most important academic topics in American Politics but also one of the most discussed among the media and public as well.
 
The sheer volume of work that Keith Poole has contributed to the discipline is impressive in its own right: eight books, one monograph, and 68 articles. The body of this work has advanced our discipline's understanding of many fundamental questions in American democracy such as: how inequality contributes to ideological polarization and, with it, becomes a major problem for the nation; in economic policy, and how developments in infrastructure were key to American economic development and how poor economic policy can lead to financial crises. His methodological book and article contributions most centrally surround measurement theory. In these publications, Keith has shown the value of applying scaling techniques to the analysis of parliamentary voting, created new measurement techniques, and importantly has shown readers how they can apply the techniques in their own research. By developing standalone software, R packages, and example code for his books, he has fundamentally advanced political scientists' ability to conduct better research with original data using advanced measurement techniques.
 
What is less commonly known about Keith is that he has also been a tremendous mentor to a number of political methodologists. Keith has taught, mentored, advised, and/or worked closely over the years with many students and scholars junior to him, including John Londregan, Nolan McCarty, Jeff Lewis, Royce Carroll, Adam Bonica, James Lo, Chris Hare, Jamie Monogan, Ryan Bakker, Michael Lynch. On more than one occasion, he was known to go extraordinarily beyond the normal call of academic good citizenship to assist and help guide students and junior colleagues. One story recounted how Keith actually “changed some of the underlying code in W-NOMINATE [at that time] and compiled a new binary to help [a first-year graduate student just recently met at a workshop with his] project.” Keith subsequently hired that graduate assistant (even though he was located at another school) to work on extensions of W-NOMINATE he was then undertaking with Jeff Lewis & Howard Rosenthal; he worked closely with and mentored this student, James Lo, ultimately producing five papers and three R packages from their collaborations. Another recounted tale is of a junior colleague trained as an economist approaching Keith with a question whether economic performance influenced autocrats’ tenure similarly to how it was understood to affect the re-election fortunes of democratic governments. Keith guided the colleague to some relevant literature, and the two realized that they could make a positive contribution, resulting in a series of papers on the causes of coups d'_etat, that this substantive application in comparative politics and analysis of macro-level panel data being quite distant from Keith’s work on scaling and on the American Congress deterring him not in the least; that colleague, John Londregan, says of the experience: “This research project with Keith is one of the primary reasons my research agenda shifted from economics to political economy.” Keith’s engagement with younger scholars has exerted an enormous benign influence beyond his advisees and junior colleagues as well: Consider the huge number of scholars (a short list would include Josh Clinton, Jeff Lewis, Adam Bonica, John Londregan, Nolan McCarty, Simon Jackman, Douglas Rivers, Sebastian Saiegh, Marc Ratkovic) whose research builds on or depends on Poole's scaling methodology.
 
The conclusion from the nomination letter signed by 12 other nominators is entirely fitting: “Throughout his career, Keith has pushed the field of methodology light years ahead beyond boundaries that most practitioners could not even have conceived and found limiting without his work, and repeatedly demonstrated how methodology done well can surmount them and in so doing enrich our understanding of political phenomena. He is simultaneously an intellectual giant, a deeply creative political scientist, and a methodologist par excellence. His work has set a standard for all political methodologists to follow. He has influenced generations of young political scientists not only as a standard bearer for the profession, but also as a mentor and friend.” The award committee (Rob Franzese (chair), Lonna Atkeson, Wendy Tam Cho, Kosuke Imai, and Simon Jackman) unanimously and enthusiastically concur in awarding Keith Poole the 2016 Career Achievement Award of the Society for Political Methodology.

Selection committee: Robert Franzese (Michigan, chair), Wendy K. Tam Cho (Illinois), Lonna Atkenson (New Mexico), Kosuke Imai (Princeton), Simon Jackman (Sydney)

Douglas Rivers

Stanford University

Professor Rivers numerous academic publications have covered enormous ranges substantively while breaking much new ground methodologically. In his earliest work (joint with Douglas Hibbs and Nicholas Vassilatos), Rivers and coauthors developed and applied nonlinear models of opinion and voting to estimate, among other things, the political costs to policymakers of inflation and unemployment. He continued from there substantively and methodologically, co-authoring influential pieces on retrospective and economic voting (joint with D. Roderick Kiewiet) and on public opinion and presidential influence in congress (with Nancy Rose). He wrote also around this time on incumbency advantage (with Morris Fiorina), on strategic voting in primaries (with Bruce Cain), and on sophisticated voting Congress (with Keith Krehbiel), contributing important methodological advances in those core areas of study in American politics.

Between these important sets of early academic contributions, Professor Rivers (with Jeffrey Dubin) also created SST, Statistical Software Tools (1985), one of the earliest statistical-software packages for the PC, which quickly became the mainstay tool of its time for statistical analysis in political science (and around the social sciences).

Meanwhile, Professor Rivers continued producing innovative academic work that had great impact on statistical methodology. The papers with Quang Vuong (J. Econometrics 1988: over 1200 cites & Econometrics J. 2002) introduced new estimation and testing methods for simultaneous probit models and model-selection methods for nonlinear dynamic models. The 1988 Journal of Econometrics paper is perhaps the first technical paper a political methodologist wrote to receive great appreciation and have major impact beyond political science. The 2004 APSR piece (with Jackman & Clinton: over 800 cites) on The Statistical Analysis of Roll-Call Data is likewise foundational in IRT applications to ideal-point estimation, introducing Bayesian procedure for estimation and inference for spatial models.

In the past fifteen years, Professor Rivers has produced a number of the most important innovations in survey research. The broad impact of these innovations is clearly visible in the work of two companies that he founded, Knowledge Networks (now GfK Knowledge Networks) and Polimetrix (now YouGov Polimetrix). Each project leverages Professor Rivers unique combination of statistical insight and an ability to see the power of large scale opinion data years before many of his contemporaries. GfK Knowledge Networks (KN), which is widely viewed as the leading high-end Internet survey firm in America, combines best practices in recruiting a nationally representative survey with provision to survey participants of sufficient computing infrastructure, engaging activities, and monetary incentives to create and maintain a nationally representative sample of American households (with tens of thousands of participants at any point in time), known as the Knowledge Panel (for well over a decade now). The scale and quality of the Knowledge Panel enables measurement of the opinions of the nation as a whole as well as the opinions of important subpopulations. The Internet interface allows participants not just to respond to questions but also to react to visual stimuli, yielding real-time Knowledge Panel responses to, e.g., presidential debates or proposals to improve public health. Polimetrix (PM) similarly maintains a large survey panel of Americans, but, unlike KN, PM recruits subjects through multiple means that imply non-representative samples. Professor Rivers developed and implemented a range of population matching techniques see e.g., Combining Random & Non-Random Samples, Proceedings of the American Statistical Association 2003 (with Vicki Pineau and Daniel Slotwiner) that allow PM panels to simulate samples representative of the population. Whereas recruitment & maintenance of KN panels entail considerable expense, PM panels can simulate similar datasets at a fraction of the cost. PM, with Rivers population-matching techniques, provides unique research opportunities by enabling representative large-sample analysis of small areas (such as congressional districts). Through KN and PM and their associated methodological breakthroughs, Professor Rivers has done perhaps more than anyone to transform survey research in the last twenty years. Few, if any scholars, have ever had this kind of impact in the field of survey research.

Professor Rivers has also been an early and influential member of the Society, has won the AAPOR Innovators Award and Research Business Reports Market Executive of the Year, and has served on the Boards of the American National Election Studies, the Roper Center, Preview Systems, and the CBS News Decision Desk.

Selection committee: Rob Franzese (Chair), Lonna Atkeson, Koskue Imai, Simon Jackman, Wendy Tam Cho

John R. Freeman

University of Minnesota

We are pleased to announce that Professor John R. Freeman has been selected as the recipient of the 2014 Political Methodology Career Achievement Award. This award recognizes an outstanding career of intellectual accomplishment and service to the profession in the field of Political Methodology. Previous award winners include Chris Achen, Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Nathaniel Beck, Henry Brady, John Jackson, Gary King, and James Stimson.

Professor Freeman has published 3 books, 2 book chapters, and more than 30 articles in highly ranked journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, and Political Analysis. He is the recipient of more than $700,000 in external grant funds. He is currently the John Black Johnston Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota.  His research makes important contributions to the subfield of political methodology and political science more broadly.

Professor Freeman is one of the top political methodologists in the country working on time series analysis and Bayesian methods. He was an early proponent of the use of vector autoregression (VAR) models in Political Science, and wrote important papers on Granger causality, Markov models, temporal aggregation, unit root models, and Bayesian multiple equation time series models.  His substantive contributions have been in the broad area of international political economy and IR, including work on exchange rates, macro-politics, and inter- and intra-state conflict.  His research has led to innovations in our understanding of international conflict and reciprocity in superpower relations, the interaction of democratic accountability and markets, and the role of government policy in shaping markets.

Professor Freeman has been a valuable member of the Society for Political Methodology, serving as the Society's fourth president from 1989 to 1991. He won the Robert H. Durr Award for the best paper applying quantitative methods to a substantive problem in 2006 and the Gosnell Prize for the Best Paper in Political Methodology in 2008.  He edited volumes 4, 5, and 6 of Political Analysis, which was a critical time in the development of the journal following Jim Stimson's superb start. He served as host for the summer meeting of the Society twice. He was named as a Fellow to the APSA Political Methodology Section in 2008 and as a Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. He also won the Quincy Wright best book award from the International Studies Association in 1990.

Selection committee:  Sara Mitchell (Chair), Gary King, Suzanna Linn, Jasjeet Sekhon, Curt Signorino

Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier

Ohio State University

We are pleased to announce that Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier has been selected as the recipient of the 2013 Political Methodology Career Achievement Award. This award recognizes an outstanding career of intellectual accomplishment and service to the profession in the field of Political Methodology. Previous award winners include Chris Achen, Nathaniel Beck, Henry Brady, John Jackson, Gary King, and James Stimson.

Professor Box-Steffensmeier has published 5 books, 12 book chapters, and more than 40 articles in highly ranked journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, and Legislative Studies Quarterly. She is the recipient of more than 1.5 million dollars in external grant funds. She is currently the Vernal Riffe Chair of Political Science at Ohio State University. Her research makes important contributions to the subfield of political methodology and political science more broadly.

Professor Box-Steffensmeier is one of the top political methodologists in the country working on time series analysis, publishing path-breaking research on error correction models, fractional integration, and ARFIMA models. She has made important contributions to several significant debates in American politics in her time series research, including macro-partisanship, the gender gap, elections and representation, and campaigns. She is also a leading methodologist on event history models. Her book, Event History Modeling: A Guide for Social Scientists, published by Cambridge University Press in 2004, has amassed over 900 citations in Google Scholar. She has published several other important articles on this topic as well, including such landmark publications as "Time is of the Essence: Event History Models in Political Science" (AJPS 1997), "Duration Models and Proportional Hazards in Political Science" (AJPS 2001), and "Durations Models for Repeated Events" (JOP 2002). Her work on statistics and methodology has significantly advanced our understanding of how to appropriately model political data over time and space.

Professor Box-Steffensmeier has served important leadership roles in the Society for Political Methodology including President (2005-2007) and Vice President (2003-2005) of the Political Methodology Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA) and President of the Political Methodology Society (2005-2007). She was selected by her peers as an Inaugural Fellow of the Society for Political Methodology (2008). She won the Gosnell Prize for the Best Paper in Political Methodology in 1994 and 2002. She founded the Visions in Methodology organization to mentor women in the field of political methodology. She was recognized by the ICPSR Summer Program through a scholarship in her name.

She currently serves as an associate editor for the Society's journal, Political Analysis, and served previously as an associate editor of the American Journal of Political Science (2006-2009).

Selection committee: Sara Mitchell (Chair), Gary King, Suzanna Linn, Jasjeet Sekhon, Curt Signorino

Henry E. Brady

University of California, Berkeley

We are pleased to announce that Henry Brady (University of California, Berkeley) has been selected as the recipient of the 2012 Political Methodology Career Achievement Award. This award recognizes an outstanding career of intellectual accomplishment and service to the profession in the field of Political Methodology. Previous award winners include Chris Achen, Nathaniel Beck, John Jackson, Gary King, and James Stimson.

Professor Brady has published 10 books, 2 monographs, and over 70 journal articles and book chapters. He is currently Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy and has directed the Survey Research Center at Berkeley. His research makes important contributions to the subfield of political methodology and political science more broadly.

Professor Brady has made huge contributions in a variety of fields; we do him the injustice of only highlighting a few of most relevance to The Society. His early work on scaling put multi-dimensional scaling into a statistical framework (path breaking in 1985) and then dealt with critical issues related to scaling data where the scale scores were not interpersonally comparable and to the statistical assessment of ranking data, where respondents rank all candidates in a primary. The latter work was related to Professor Brady's research on American primaries, where he was interested in questions of how primary-election voters make choices in a low information environment and the role of strategic issues in that decision. This work was extended to election studies (particularly of Canada) where Professor Brady and collaborators took advantage of new technology (computer assisted telephone interviewing, new in 1990) to study the effect of emerging issues in elections and changes over the course of an electoral campaign. Professor Brady was one of the first scholars to work with the rolling cross-section design and take good advantage of that design by using techniques that allowed for almost overnight changes in parts of the survey instrument.

In a different series of work, Professor Brady (along with Sidney Verba and Kay Schlozman) did landmark studies of American political participation. The methodological innovation was to study "serious participation" via surveys, a difficult thing to do since most Americans do not participate in a serious way. A huge survey (15,000 respondents) was conducted, of which about 2500 "serious participators" were selected for more-intensive interviews. This, and the more recent book by the same authors, allowed the authors to assess the enormous inequalities in American participation. Professor Brady (along with Cynthia Kaplan) also did innovative survey research in the former Soviet Union, providing a credible view of the dynamics of voting in the post-Soviet transition.

Professor Brady (in collaboration with David Collier) has recently been involved in trying to marry the best parts of qualitative and quantitative analysis and to come up with a new paradigm for what is good research in political science. This has spawned an interesting dialogue and opened up many new avenues of discussion. Professor Brady has pursued this important task in the book with Collier, a co-edited methodological handbook, and his Presidential address to the American Political Science Association.

Professor Brady has served important leadership roles in the Society for Political Methodology including President (2009-2010) and Vice President (2006-2007) of APSA and President of the Political Methodology Society (1992-1993). He won the Gosnell Prize for the Best Paper in Political Methodology in 2003-2004. Professor Brady was a central figure in the creation of the Society, helping to secure grant funding for the first two summer conferences. He was one of the co-PIs on the initial submission to the National Science Foundation that led to more sustained funding for the summer political methodology conferences. He has been a regular participant at the summer meetings since the Society's founding. He also serves on the editorial board for the Society's journal, Political Analysis.

Selection committee: Sara Mitchell (Chair), Gary King, Suzanna Linn, Jasjeet Sekhon, Curt Signorino

Nathaniel Beck

New York University

We are pleased to announce Neal Beck as the recipient of the 2011 Society for Political Methodology's Career Achievement Award. This award recognizes an outstanding career of intellectual accomplishment and service to the profession in the field of Political Methodology. Chris Achen, John Jackson, James Stimson, and Gary King were the first four award winners. All of these scholars gave the field new methodological tools, and all five built and sustained institutions for the field.

Beck's work on time-series has improved the analysis of time series and panel data across the social sciences. His work with Jonathan Katz on panel-corrected-standard errors created now-standard parts of the toolkit of econometrics, and is included in the major econometric texts and packages. Beck made important arguments about serial correlation, that it is not just a nuisance term requiring correction to gain efficiency, but is a form of substantive misspecification. He pushed scholars to think about the dynamic process that yielded the serial correlation as an outcome.

Beck edited Political Analysis from 1999 to 2003. Through a uniquely creative style, and incredible hard work, Beck made an enormous contribution as editor of Political Analysis. He revitalized the journal, convinced reviewers to contribute more effort, and took authors and their papers to the next level in terms of quality and effort. As a direct result of his work and others, Political Analysis is now the single most influential journal in the discipline. Beck was also the treasurer and vice president of the Society for Political Methodology, putting the institution on a firm financial footing, and is an ever present (and persistent!) voice for quality.

Beck has won the Gosnell Prize for the Best Paper in Political Methodology twice. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is an Inaugural Fellow of the Society for Political Methodology.

Selection committee: Nancy Burns (Chair), Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Jake Bowers, Jim Stimson, Tse-min Lin

Gary King

Harvard University

We are pleased to announce the 2010 recipient of the Society for Political Methodology's Career Achievement Award. This award recognizes scholars who have made intellectual contributions that have given the field new ideas and new tools, while, at the same time, they have given the field sustaining institutions. This year's recipient is Gary King, the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard University.

With Unifying Political Methodology, Gary began a careers' worth of pointing our way to new intellectual agendas. Designing Social Inquiry (1994) alone has been cited more than 3,000 times. It has had a profound influence on the conduct of social science, instilling a practice of scientific rigor in a generation of qualitative and quantitative political scientists.

Gary's career has been filled with introducing, teaching, and then thoroughly mainstreaming new frame-shifting methodological approaches. His contributions have been so successful that methods that once seemed out of reach to many are part of the fabric of our work.

Gary has approached his research with a sharp sense for how to improve the discipline's methods and for how to communicate those improvements to a wide audience. He has made field-changing contributions on a wide variety of methodological topics, including missing data, research design, causal inference, survey research, and ecological inference. He is the author of more than 115 journal articles, 15 public domain software packages, and 8 books, many of which are used both within and outside academia. He appears in the ISI's list of the most highly cited researchers in the social sciences. Gary has won more than 25 "best of" prizes and awards for his methodological work. His impact has spanned decades; he won the Pi Sigma Alpha Award for the best paper at the Midwest Political Science Association's annual conference in 1993, 1998, and 2005. Gary is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy, and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

He is a very effective teacher and mentor. Scores of his students have gone onto careers at leading universities around the world. His mentoring has extended across the field, well beyond his students.

Gary's institutional impact on the field comes not just from the way his ideas have helped form the intellectual toolkit for the field, but also from his informal and formal institution building. Perhaps the most important of these institutional contributions comes in the form of the norms Gary created and sustained for the profession. Gary changed the norms of the field via the provision of free, easy-to-use software. He taught a generation of methodologists by example; as a consequence of his work, it is now standard practice to make free (and now open-source) software available, making it possible for good ideas to become part of practice much more rapidly. Almost single-handedly, Gary created and made wide-spread the norm of replication in political science. In addition, he has worked tirelessly to foster data sharing across the social sciences. In his formal institutional work, Gary participated in the first Ann Arbor meeting of the Society for Political Methodology. He was influential in the 2006 Political Methodology report that guided the section in new directions. He was the founding editor of The Political Methodologist. He served as President of the Society for Political Methodology.

Selection committee: Nancy Burns (Chair), Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Jake Bowers, Jim Stimson, Tse-min Lin

James A. Stimson

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Stimson led a major intellectual conceptualization of the field with hiswork on time-series and particularly on the analysis of pooled time-series and cross-sectional data and designs. His substantive work on issue evolution inspired his important AJPS paper on "Regression in Space and Time." This paper initiated a very large body of innovative methodological and applied work, much of which is still being explored. The reach of this work expands beyond Stimson's own field of American politics and is now a fixture in comparative politics and international relations, where the paper has been cited in scholarship ranging from work explaining the number of parties in Argentina to work exploring the determinants of international trade. His work with aggregate time-series data stimulated many important methodological and substantive discussions and papers and was one of the first uses of Box-Jenkins time series methods in Political Science. Stimson originated and provided definition and direction for the use and understanding of these methods in the field.

His work with Edward Carmines on issue evolution and the long-term connection between parties, the mass public, and representation has had a tremendous impact. His solo work on the nature of public opinion and public policy mood reshaped how scholars think about public opinion. His collaboration with Michael MacKuen and Robert Erikson on The Macro Polity challenged the conventional wisdom on partisanship and extant understandings about the link between economics and politics. His work on public mood led him to create the time series measurement algorithm CALC which has been used by numerous other scholars for their own applications. For The Macro Polity, Stimson and his collaborators were early pioneers in work with the DYMIMIC estimator to model the dynamic link between time series with multiple indicators. On the measurement side, his public mood scale is the most widely used measure of public liberalism across time at the macro-level.

Stimson's work has been widely recognized and has received numerous prestigious awards. His book, Issue Evolution, with Carmines received the Kammerer Award in 1990 as the APSA's best book in American politics; Tides of Consent received the 2006 Goldsmith Prize from the Shorenstein Center at the John F. Kennedy School for the best book on politics, the press and public affairs; in 1996 he shared the Heinz Eulau prize for the best paper published in the APSR the previous year; and in 2005 he shared the McGraw-Hill Award for the best paper published on law and courts. In 2000 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His scholarly work is widely praised, and the breadth of topics is impressive.

Stimson has served the Society in almost every way possible. Jim attended the first Summer Political Methodology Workshop in Ann Arbor in July, 1984. This workshop laid the foundation for the Society for Political Methodology and the now twenty-six year long series of summer conferences that have grown from fifteen to three hundred participants. He served as the organization's president from 1995-1997.

Stimson is also responsible for one of the Society's most important institutions. He was the original editor of our very successful journal, Political Analysis. His work to establish Political Analysis as a major journal at a time when the organization barely existed and then his editorial leadership for the first three issues created the journal we now have and value. His vision for the journal and his incredible energy, patience, and persistence are evident in the journal's reputation and impact.

Finally, Stimson has been a tremendously successful mentor and collaborator in the field. We are so grateful to Stimson for all of this work.

Selection committee: Nancy Burns (Chair), Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Jake Bowers, John Jackson, Tse-min Lin

John Jackson

University of Michigan

John was at the forefront in the establishment of the field. Long before most were aware of what political methodology was about, John was extremely active, bringing scholars together and laying the foundation for work to come. John was publishing high quality statistical analyses in the APSR in the early 1970s, and his influential text "Statistical Methods for Social Scientists," coauthored with Eric Hanushek in 1977, is still considered one of the best. Likewise, John's pioneering empirical work showed that party identification need not be seen as an essentially permanent identity learned in childhood. Instead, John demonstrated that partisanship also reflects an accumulation of citizens' adult experiences with the parties -- a perspective that has been built on by many empirical and theoretical scholars, and that has become the most widely accepted view of how partisan identity is.

John's record of service to the subfield is equally impressive. He served as the 2nd President of the Society for Political Methodology from 1985-1987, and was instrumental in securing funding for the early meetings from the National Election Studies and later the National Science Foundation. Moreover, John has always been (and continues to be) known for reaching out to graduate students, spending time with them at them at the Political Methodology Meetings and assisting with their integration into the discipline. And, John has been instrumental in the maturation of the subfield in another way, as he has led the charge when it comes to the forging of ties between political methodologists and methodologists in other fields (both in his own collaborations and in institutions) Ð this has been of fundamental importance to the bettering of the subfield.

Stimson's work has been widely recognized and has received numerous prestigious awards. His book, Issue Evolution, with Carmines received the Kammerer Award in 1990 as the APSA's best book in American politics; Tides of Consent received the 2006 Goldsmith Prize from the Shorenstein Center at the John F. Kennedy School for the best book on politics, the press and public affairs; in 1996 he shared the Heinz Eulau prize for the best paper published in the APSR the previous year; and in 2005 he shared the McGraw-Hill Award for the best paper published on law and courts. In 2000 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His scholarly work is widely praised, and the breadth of topics is impressive.

John's work has always brought methodological insight to important substantive questions, and he continues to publish state-of-the-art work, having recently co-authored a book on Polish elections ("The Political Economy of Poland's Transition," with Jacek Klich and Krystyna Poznanska). In addition, John is still extremely active in the Society for Political Methodology, being both a regular at the summer meetings and a mentor to many. This year, John's career achievements were recognized in his election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, confirming what one eloquent nominator noted: "John is an icon for political methodology."

Selection committee: Janet Box-Steffensmeier (Chair), Christopher Achen, William Berry, Simon Jackman

Christopher H. Achen

Princeton University

Christopher H. Achen is the inaugural recipient of the Career Achievement Award of the Society for Political Methodology. Achen is the Roger William Straus Professor of Social Sciences in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics, at Princeton University. He was a founding member and first president of theSociety for Political Methodology, and has held faculty appointments at the University of Michigan, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the University of Rochester, and Yale University. He has a Ph.D. from Yale, and was an undergraduate at Berkeley.

In the words of one of the many colleagues writing to nominate Achen for this award, “Chris more or less made the field of political methodology”. In a series of articles and books now spanning some thirty years, Achen has consistently reminded us of the intimate connection between methodological rigor and substantive insights in political science. To summarize (and again, borrowing from another colleague’s letter of nomination), Achen’s methodological contributions are “invariably practical, invariably forceful, and invariably presented with clarity and liveliness”. In a series of papers in 1970s, Chris basically showed how us how to do political methodology, elegantly demonstrating how methodological insights are indispensable to understanding a phenomenon as central to political science as representation. Achen’s “little green Sage book”,

Interpreting and Using Regression (1982) has remained in print for 25 years, and has provided generations of social scientists with a compact yet rigorous introduction to the linear regression model (the workhorse of quantitative social science), and is probably the most widely read methodological book authored by a political methodologist. Achen’s 1983 review essay “Towards Theories of Data: The State of Political Methodology” set an agenda for the field that still powerfully shapes both the practice of political methodology and the field’s self-conception. Achen’s 1986 book The Statistical Analysis of Quasi-Experiments provides a brilliant exposition of the statistical problems stemming from non-random assignment to “treatment”, a topic very much in vogue again today. Achen’s 1995 book with Phil Shivley, Cross-Level Inference, provides a similarly clear and wise exposition of the issues arising when aggregated data are used to make inferences about individual behavior (“ecological inference”).

A series of papers on party identification -- an influential 1989 conference paper, “Social Psychology, Demographic Variables, and Linear Regression: Breaking the Iron Triangle in Voting Research” (Political Behavior, 1992) and “Parental Socialization and Rational Party Identification” (Political Behavior, 2002) -- have helped formalize the “revisionist” theory of party identification outlined by Fiorina in his 1981 Retrospective Voting book, and now the subject of a lively debate among scholars of American politics.

In addition to being a productive and extremely influential scholar, Achen has an especially distinguished record in training graduate students in methodology, American politics, comparative politics and international relations. His students at Berkeley in the late 1970s and early 1980s included Larry Bartels (now at Princeton), Barbara Geddes (UCLA), Steven Rosenstone (Minnesota), and John Zaller (UCLA), among many others. His students at Michigan in the 1990s include Bear Braumoeller (now at Harvard), Ken Goldstein (Wisconsin), Simon Hug (Texas-Austin), Anne Sartori (Princeton), and Karen Long Jusko (Stanford). In addition to being the founding president of the Society for Political Methodology, Chris has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, has served as a member of the APSA Council, has won campus-wide awards for both research and teaching, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Selection committee: Simon Jackman (Chair), Elisabeth Gerber, Marco Steenbergen, R. Michael Alvarez