The Statistical Software Award

The Best Statistical Software Award recognizes individuals for developing statistical software that makes a significant research contribution.

2021 Winner
Software fastLink
Developers
Ted Enamorado (WUSTL)
Kosuke Imai (Harvard)
Ben Fifield (ACLU Legal Analytics Group)

Citation

The Statistical Software Award Committee is pleased to announce fastLink by Ted Enamorado (WUSTL), Kosuke Imai (Harvard), and Ben Fifield (ACLU Legal Analytics Group) as the winner of the 2021 Society for Political Methodology Statistical Software Award. fastLink solves a common problem faced by researchers in political science as well as across the social sciences: merging multiple datasets that do not share unique record identifiers. This problem arises when linking data between surveys and administrative data, among multiple survey rounds, when connecting historical to modern administrative units, and in many other situations. Most applied work relies on manual or ad hoc merging of non-exact matches or deterministic algorithms, none of which can be used to quantify the amount of error in the merge.

Selection committee

Nick Beauchamp (Northeastern), Graeme Blair (UCLA), Clayton Webb (Kansas), and Sarah Bouchat (Northwestern, Chair)

Past Recipients

Year Developers Software
2020
Kenneth Benoit
Kohei Watanabe
Haiyan Wang
Paul Nulty
Adam Obeng
Stefan Müller
Akitaka Matsuo
quanteda
2019
Graeme Blair (UCLA)
Jasper Cooper (Princeton)
Alexander Coppock (Yale)
Macartan Humphreys (Columbia and WZB Berlin)
Clara Bicalho (WZB Berlin)
Neal Fultz (Comake)
Lily Medina (WZB Berlin)
Aaron Rudkin (UCLA)
Luke Sonnet (UCLA)
DeclareDesign
2018
Molly Roberts (UC San Diego)
Brandon Stewart (Princeton)
Dustin Tingley (Harvard) 
stm: An R package for
Structural Topic Models
2017
Matias D. Cattaneo (Michigan)
Sebastian Calonico (University of Miami)
Max H. Farrell (Chicago)
Michael Jansson (Berkeley)
Xinwei Ma (Michigan)
Rocio Titiunik (Michigan)
Gonzalo Vazquez-Bare (Michigan)
RD Software Packages
2016
Jirka Lewandowski (Berlin Social Science Center, WZB)
Sven Regel (Berlin Social Science Center, WZB)
Nicolas Merz (Berlin Social Science Center, WZB)
Pola Lehmann (Berlin Social Science Center, WZB)
Manifesto Project
2015
Dustin Tingley (Harvard)
Teppei Yamamoto (MIT)
Kentaro Hirose (Princeton)
Luke Keele (Penn State)
Kosuke Imai (Princeton)
mediation: R Package for
Causal Mediation Analysis
2014
James Honaker (Harvard)
Gary King (Harvard)
Matt Blackwell (University of Rochester)
Amelia II
2013
Andrew Martin (Washington University, St. Louis)
Kevin Quinn (UC Berkeley)
Jonghee Park (Seoul National University) 
MCMCpack
2012
Walter Mebane (Michigan)
Jasjeet Sekhon (UC Berkeley)
Genoud
2011
Norman Nie (Stanford)
Dale Bent (Athabasca University)
Hadlai Hull (SPSS Inc.)
SPSS (Statistical Package
for the Social Sciences)
2010
Jeffrey Dubin (Pacific Economics Group)
Doug Rivers (Stanford)
2009
Keith Poole (UC San Diego)
Howard Rosenthal (NYU)
NOMINATE

Past Selection Committees

Year Committee
2020 Nick Beauchamp (Northeastern), Graeme Blair (UCLA), Clayton Webb (Kansas), and Sarah Bouchat (Northwestern, Chair)
2019 Sarah Bouchat (Northwestern), Dustin Tingley (Harvard), and Adam Glynn (Emory, Chair)
2018 Jeffrey Arnold (University of Washington), Sarah Bouchat (Northwestern), Adam Glynn (Emory, Chair)
2017 Arthur Spirling (NYU, Chair), Justin Esarey (Rice) and Jamie Monogan (Georgia)
2016 Mike Ward (Duke), Matt Blackwell (Harvard), Alexander Tahk (Wisconsin)