2019

Jeffrey Lewis (University of California, Los Angeles) and Jasjeet Sekhon (University of California, Berkeley)

Citation:

Jeffrey Lewis

Professor Jeffrey B. Lewis is a Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of California, Los Angeles; he received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998.

Lewis has made significant contributions to political methodology, most notably, to research on scaling and ideal point estimation. He has advanced the methodology on ideal point estimation and , developed tools and applications to make the respective methods more readily usable for contemporary scholars. We point to papers like his 2009 Political Analysis work with Carrol, Lo, Poole, and Rosenthal, and his 2004 Political Analysis paper with Poole, as examples of the fundamental contributions that Lewis has made to these important areas of political methodology. These articles are widely read and cited contributions to the literature. Professor Lewis’s software packages are important components of his contribution to political methodology. His PolCA package for latent class analysis, the WNominate package, and the anominate package, have played important roles in the research of many political scientistis. They are significant contributions to software development in political methodology. The facts that Professor Lewis has won prestigious awards like the Miller Prize and also several grants from the National Science Foundation further attest to the importance of his research.

Finally, Professor Lewis provided strong leadership for The Society of Political Methodology, and for the professional advancement of methodology. He served as President of The Society for Political Methodology in 2015-2017, and vice president in 2013-2015. Professor Lewis also served on various society committees (for example, the Career Award Committee and the Publications Committee in 2018). He served as co-editor of the American Political Science Review between 2008 and 2011.

Jasjeet Sekhon

Professor Jasjeet Singh Sekhon is the Robson Professor of Political Science and Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in 1999 from Cornell University.

Sekhon has made important contributions to our understanding of causal inference and experimental design. His contributions in these areas have appeared in leading journals in political science, but also in more general interest scientific journals like PNAS as well as journals in statistics and medicine. His publications on causal inference are widely cited. A good example is his 2011 Political Analysis paper with Caughey that examines close U.S. House elections using regression discontinuity. His papers on genetic matching, for example his 2013 paper with Diamond in the Review of Economics and Statistics, and his 2009 review paper on matching methods in the Annual Review of Politicial Science, are widely read. His recent research on survey experiments is starting to receive considerable attention (for example, his 2018 paper with a number of co-authors in Political Analysis on using sample weights in survey experiments won the Warren Miller Prize for the best paper published in 2018 in the journal).

Furthermore, Professor Sekhon has contributed a number of software packages that are widely used by researchers, including the Matching package for propensity score matching with balance optimatization and rgenoud. The latter package received the 2012 Society for Political Methodology Software Award.

In addition to winning the Miller Prize for his 2018 paper, Sekhon has been awarded the Gosnell Prize and the Durr Best Paper Award. The National Science Foundation has supported his research several times.

Sekhon has been very active in Society for Political Methodology. For example, recently he has served on the Society’s Corporate Relations committee. In 2012-2014 he was a member of the Society’s Career Award Committee and he served as chair of the Software Award Committee in 2009-2010. Professor Sekhon was an Associate Editor for the Society’s journal Political Analysis (2012-2015). He is currently an Associate Editor for the Journal of the American Statistical Association.