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Christopher H. Achen, (Princeton University)
Citation
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.