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Gary King (Harvard University)
Citation
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.