The Gosnell Prize for Excellence in Political Methodology is awarded for the best work in political methodology presented at any political science conference during the preceding year.
Past Recipients
2022 Winner | |
Recipient |
Joseph T. Ornstein (Georgia)
Elise N. Blasingame (Georgia)
Jake S. Truscott (Purdue)
|
Work | "How to Train Your Stochastic Parrot: Large Language Models for Political Texts" |
Citation | Ornstein, Blasingame, and Truscott propose a new simple approach to using the recent large language models for political texts. Using the pre-registered analyses, the authors showed that, by tailoring prompts, a simple prediction from the GPT-3 can outperform conventional supervised learning methods in various text-as-data tasks in political science (e.g., sentiment analysis, ideological scaling, and topic modeling). We were impressed by the performance of the proposed approach, as well as the authors’ careful and modest validation through pre-registration of a range of tasks. The award committee thinks that this paper can help political scientists and political methodologists generate a series of new ideas about how political scientists can apply and modify the large language model (like GPT-3 and GPT-4) for our own tasks, and, importantly, how we validate their performance in each application carefully. There are a large number of open questions, like how best to engineer prompts, how best to fine-tune predictions for political texts using domain knowledge, and how best to apply (or not to apply) these methods to corpora outside of the pre-training data. Ornstein et al.’s work will be a great starting point for further methodological developments. We congratulate the authors on this fine contribution to work on natural language processing and text-as-data methods in political science. |
Selection committee | Bryce Dietrich (Purdue), Dorothy Kronick (Berkeley), Naoki Egami (Columbia), and Anand Sokhey (Colorado, chair) |
Avidit Acharya (Stanford)
Kirk Bansak (UC San Diego)
Jens Hainmueller (Stanford)
Work
"Combining Outcome-Based and Preference-Based Matching: A Constrained Priority Mechanism"
Citation
Acharya et al.'s paper opens up a new opportunity to connect political methodology, machine learning, and mechanism design — the latter is a lively field in Economics, and has clear implications for designing real-world institutions. This paper tackles one of the most important problems in society and in political science — refugee settlements and integration — by designing a mechanism to allocate refugees while taking into account the preferences of both refugees and planners. Moreover, the paper is notable in that it provides three significant contributions: (1) it connects two large literatures that have been studied separately, (2) it provides a new methodological/theoretical contribution, and (3) it provides an important application (the authors are implementing it with the Dutch government).
Selection committee
Skyler Cranmer (Ohio State), Naoki Egami (Princeton), and Anand Sokhey (Colorado, chair)
Year | Recipient | Work |
2020 | Dean Knox (Princeton), Christopher Lucas (Wash U) | "A Dynamic Model of Speech for the Social Sciences" |
2019 | Naoki Egami (Princeton) | "Identification of Causal Diffusion Effects using Stationary Causal Directed Acyclic Graphs" |
2018 | Fredrik Savje (Yale), Peter Aronow (Yale), and Michael Hudgens (UNC) | "A Folk Theorem on Interference in Experiments" |
2017 | Matthew Blackwell (Harvard) | "Instrumental Variable Methods for Conditional Effects and Causal Interaction in Voter Mobilization Experiments" |
2016 | Marc Rotkovic (Princeton), Dustin Tingley (Harvard) | "Sparse Estimation with Uncertainty: Subgroup Analysis in Large Dimensional Designs" |
2015 | Sebastian Calonico, Matias Cattaneo, and Rocio Titiunik | "Robust Nonparametric Confidence Intervals for Regression-Discontinuity Designs" |
2014 | Margaret E. Roberts (UC San Diego), Brandon M. Stewart (Harvard), Dustin Tingley (Harvard), Christopher Lucas (Harvard), Jetson Leder-Luis (Caltech), Shana Gadarian (Syracuse), Bethany Albertson (UT Austin), and David Rand (Yale) | "Topic Models for Open-Ended Survey Responses with Applications to Experiments" |
2013 | Adam Glynn and Konstantin Kashin (Harvard) | "Front-door Versus Back-door Adjustment with Unmeasured Confounding: Bias Formulas for Front-door and Hybrid Adjustments." |
2012 | Thomas Gschwend, James Lo, and Sven-Oliver Proksch (University of Mannheim) | "A Common Left-Right Scale for Voters and Parties in Europe." |
2011 | Robert J. Franzese, Jr. (University of Michigan), Jude C. Hays, Aya Kachi (University of Illinois) | "Modeling History-Dependent Network Coevolution" |
2010 | Jong Hee Park (University of Chicago) | "Joint Modeling of Dynamic and Cross-Sectional Heterogeneity: Introducing Hidden Markov Panel Models" |
2009 | John Freeman (University of Minnesota), and Jeff Gill (Washington University in St. Louis) | "Dynamic Elicited Priors for Updating Covert Networks." |
2008 | Kevin Quinn (Harvard) | "What Can be Learned from a Simple Table? Bayesian Inference and Sensitivity Analysis for Causal Effects from 2x2 and 2x2xK Tables in the Presence of Unmeasured Confounding." |
2007 | Alberto Abadie, Alexis Diamond, and Jens Hainmueller (Harvard) | "Estimating the Effect of California's Tobacco Control Program." |
2006 | Michael Penn Colaresi (Michigan State), Michael Crespin (University of Georgia), Burt L. Monroe (Michigan State), Kevin M. Quinn (Harvard), and Dragomir R. Radev (University of Michigan) | "An Automated Method of Topic-Coding Legislative Speech Over Time With Application to the 105th-108th U.S. Senate" |
2005 | Alexis Diamond (Harvard) and Jasjeet S. Sekhon (UC Berkeley) | "Genetic Matching for Estimating Causal Effects: A General Multivariate Matching Method for Achieving Balance in Observational Studies." |
2004 | Henry Brady, John McNulty (UC Berkeley) | "A “Natural Experiment” on the Costs of Voting: Methodologies for Analyzing Observational Data when the Treatment is Nearly Randomized." |
2003 | Won-Ho Park (University of Michigan) | "Estimation of Voter Transition Rates and Ecological Inference." |
2002 | Janet Box-Steffensmeier (Ohio State), and Suzanna De Boef (Penn State) | "A Monte Carlo Analysis for Recurrent Events Data." |
2001 | Andrew D. Martin, Kevin M. Quinn (University of Washington) | "Bayesian Learning about Ideal Points of U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 1953-1999." |
2000 | Curtis S. Signorino, Kuzey Yilmaz (University of Rochester) | "Strategic Misspecification in Discrete Choice Models." |
1999 | Nathaniel Beck (UC San Diego), Gary King (Harvard), and Langche Zeng (Harvard University on leave from GWU) | "Improving Quantitative Studies of International Conflict: A Conjecture." |
1998 | Dean Lacy (Ohio State) | "A Theory of Nonseparable Preferences in Survey Responses." |
1997 | Gary King (Harvard) | "A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior From Aggregate Data." |
1996 | Nathaniel Beck (UC San Diego), and Richard Tucker (Indiana) | "Conflict in Space and Time: Time-Series-Cross-Section Analysis with a Binary Dependent Variable." |
1996 | Walter R Mebane, Jr., and Jonathan Wand (Cornell University) | "Markov Chain Models for Rolling Cross-section Data: How Campaign Events and Political Awareness Affect Vote Intentions and Partisanship in the United States and Canada." |
1995 | Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier (Ohio State), Renee Smith (University of Rochester) | "The Microfoundations of Aggregate Partisanship." |
1995 | Bradley Palmquist (Harvard) | "Respecification Approaches to Ecological Inference: A Comparison of Control Variables and the Quadratic Model." |
Past Selection Committees
Year | Committee |
2020 | Anand Sokhey (Colorado, chair), Naoki Egami (Princeton), and Skyler Cranmer (Ohio State) |
2019 | Matthew Blackwell (Harvard), Marc Ratkovic (Princeton), and Fredrik Savje (Yale) |
2018 | Matthew Blackwell (Chair), Marc Ratkovic, Fredrik Savje |
2017 | Michael Peress (Chair), Matt Blackwell, Marc Ratkovic |
2016 | Michael Peress (Chair), Suzanne Linn, Brandon Stewart |
2015 | Jake Bowers (Chair), Adam Glynn, Xun Pang |
2014 | Jake Bowers (Chair), Adam Glynn, Xun Pang |
2013 | Jay Goodliffe (Chair), Jong Hee Park, Michael Peress |
2012 | Jay Goodliffe (Chair), Jong Hee Park, Michael Peress |
2011 | Matthew Lebo (Chair), Kenneth Kollman, Betsy Sinclair |
2010 | Matthew Lebo (Chair), Kenneth Kollman, Betsy Sinclair |
2009 | Kenneth Kollman (Chair), Betsy Sinclair, Matthew Lebo |
2008 | Kenneth Kollman (Chair) |
2007 | Michael Ward (Chair), Michael Crespin (winner from previous year), Patrick Brandt |
2006 | Michael Ward (Chair), Alexis Diamond (winner from previous year), Robert Luskin |