The Emerging Scholar Award

The Emerging Scholar selection committee for 2025, consisting of Neal Beck, Matthew Blackwell, Suzanna Linn, John Londregan, and Xun Pang unanimously and enthusiastically names Naoki Egami, currently an Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT as the winner of the 2025 Emerging Scholar award.

A graduate of the University of Tokyo, Egami earned his PhD from Princeton in 2020.  To date he has published 16 papers in refereed journals including Political Analysis (thrice), the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A (twice), and Series B (once), the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and the Annals of Applied Statistics.  His work wins praise from both methodologists and substantively oriented researchers who use his work, and he has won plaudits for teaching at Columbia, Princeton, and the University of Tokyo Summer Program. He is coauthor of six publicly downloadable statistical software packages in R.  He has in addition brought in various grants, including an NSF grant for over $230 thousand dollars as solo Principle Investigator to enhance the external validity of randomized control trials.

His extensive research portfolio spans several lines of methodological investigation, and makes contact with substantive research problems across a gamut of applications in Comparative and American politics. We note in particular his research agenda in external validity including his 2023 paper in the American Political Science Review with Erin Hartman and his 2025 paper on designing multi-site experiments with Diana Da In Lee. The paper with Hartman is already widely cited and provides an essential framework for thinking about external validity across research methods.

A second theme in Egami's research is estimating causal models in a network setting, this includes a 2021 paper based on his dissertation in Political Analysis looking at spillover effects in networks, and his 2024 publication with Eric J. Tchetgen Tchetgen in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B. This research was also important in his 2022 American Journal of Political Science coauthored paper on hate crimes, which was also connected with his dissertation.

A third theme in Egami's research deals with Large Language Models.  These are often used to generate ``upstream" measures that themselves become the objects of ``downstream" analysis. The problem here is that measurement error and subjective bias in the upstream measure can lead to magnified biases in the downstream analysis.  Egami and his coauthors develop measures that accurately reflect the true uncertainty of the downstream estimates, and they provide guidance on how to mitigate the biases.  Egami and his collaborators already have two publications in refereed journals from this project, with a third under review.

Egami also has work initiated during his time as a graduate student on the central role of interaction effects in conjoint analysis. Leading to coauthored publications with his thesis advisor in the Journal of the American Statistical Association in 2019 and Political Analysis in 2022. 

Neal Beck, Xun Pang, Suzie Linn,,Matthew Blackwell, John Londregan (chair)

The Emerging Scholar Committee is pleased to announce Molly Roberts as the 2021 Society for Political Methodology Emerging Scholar Award recipient. Roberts has made important contributions to the field of political methodology in scholarship, service, and mentorship. Roberts is an intellectual leader in the field of political methodology for her contributions to the methods of automated content analysis, topic models, and experimentation. Her work in this area has been published in Political Analysis, American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Nature, and Science, among other outlets.  Her co-authored book, Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences, will be published this year by Princeton University Press. In addition, she has co-developed multiple R packages, including the popular stm package for structural topic models. Much of her substantive research has focused on the politics of censorship in China, including an award-winning book, Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2018). Roberts is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at the University of California, San Diego, where she also holds the Chancellor’s Associates Endowed Chair. She received her PhD in government from Harvard University in 2014. Finally, Roberts is an active member of the Society—winner of the 2014 PolMeth Harold F. Gosnell Prize, a frequent participant in the summer meeting, and a member of Political Analysis editorial board.