Dear Society members and friends,

It is my plessure to announce that Dana Higgins (Harvard) is the winner of this year's Best Poster Award for her poster, "Disaggregating Data Using Multiple Imputation: Battle Related Deaths". The Society for Political Methodology Poster Award is given for the best poster presented at the annual summer Methodology Meeting of the previous year.  The award will be made at our business meeting on Friday, September 1st at 6:30 during APSA meetings in in Hilton Union Square, Golden Gate 5.  My thanks to the selection committee of Neal Beck (NYU, chair), Jeff Gill (American), Ines Levin (UC Irvine) and Sara Mitchell (Iowa) for their work. The committee citation follows.

Best,

Jeff  

CITATION:

After viewing a large number of outstanding posters at the 2016 Summer Polmeth Meeting, the committee selected Dana Higgins' (Harvard University) project, "Disaggregating Data Using Multiple Imputation: Battle Related Deaths", for the best graduate student poster award. In her poster, Higgins utilizes multiple imputation procedures to estimate monthly battle death rates in interstate and civil conflicts with data from the UCDP/PRIO project. Most analysts use data at a much higher temporal aggregation (e.g. annual) which makes it difficult to study the effectiveness of third party interventions in wars. Higgins generates a new monthly dataset for battle deaths which is challenging given that only 32 percent of cases have complete information. Higgins validates the new imputed dataset with information from the GED database and shows that she is able to obtain accurate estimates of battle deaths within one standard deviation of actual death counts. This approach will be very va!
 luable for scholars seeking to study the dynamics of war severity.

--

Jeffrey B. Lewis
Professor, Department of Political Science
Director, Center for American Politics and Public Policy
University of California, Los Angeles
BOX 951472, 4289A Bunche Hall
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1472

President 
The Society for Political Methodology

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