I am very pleased to announce that Douglas Rivers is the winner of the Society for Political Methodology’s 2015 Career Achievement Award. This award recognizes an outstanding career of intellectual accomplishment and service to the profession in the field of Political Methodology. Previous award winners include Chris Achen, Nathaniel Beck, Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Henry Brady, John Freeman, John Jackson, Gary King, and James Stimson. 

Please join me in congratulating Doug on this very prestigious honor. 

The citation from the award committee (Rob Franzese (chair), Lonna Atkeson, Kosuke Imai, Simon Jackman, and Wendy Tam Cho) is the following:

Professor Rivers’ numerous academic publications have covered enormous ranges substantively while breaking much new ground methodologically. In his earliest work (joint with Douglas Hibbs and Nicholas Vassilatos), Rivers and coauthors developed and applied nonlinear models of opinion and voting to estimate, among other things, the political costs to policymakers of inflation and unemployment. He continued from there substantively and methodologically, co-authoring influential pieces on retrospective and economic voting (joint with D. Roderick Kiewiet) and on public opinion and presidential influence in congress (with Nancy Rose). He wrote also around this time on incumbency advantage (with Morris Fiorina), on strategic voting in primaries (with Bruce Cain), and on sophisticated voting Congress (with Keith Krehbiel), contributing important methodological advances in those core areas of study in American politics.
 
Between these important sets of early academic contributions, Professor Rivers (with Jeffrey Dubin) also created SST, Statistical Software Tools (1985), one of the earliest statistical-software packages for the PC, which quickly became the mainstay tool of its time for statistical analysis in political science (and around the social sciences).
 
Meanwhile, Professor Rivers continued producing innovative academic work that had great impact on statistical methodology. The papers with Quang Vuong (J. Econometrics 1988: over 1200 cites & Econometrics J. 2002) introduced new estimation and testing methods for simultaneous probit models and model-selection methods for nonlinear dynamic models. The 1988 Journal of Econometrics paper is perhaps the first technical paper a political methodologist wrote to receive great appreciation and have major impact beyond political science. The 2004 APSR piece (with Jackman & Clinton: over 800 cites) on “The Statistical Analysis of Roll-Call Data” is likewise foundational in IRT applications to ideal-point estimation, introducing Bayesian procedure for estimation and inference for spatial models.
 
In the past fifteen years, Professor Rivers has produced a number of the most important innovations in survey research. The broad impact of these innovations is clearly visible in the work of two companies that he founded, Knowledge Networks (now GfK Knowledge Networks) and Polimetrix (now YouGov Polimetrix). Each project leverages Professor Rivers’ unique combination of statistical insight and an ability to see the power of large scale opinion data years before many of his contemporaries. GfK Knowledge Networks (KN), which is widely viewed as the leading high-end Internet survey firm in America, combines best practices in recruiting a nationally representative survey with provision to survey participants of sufficient computing infrastructure, engaging activities, and monetary incentives to create and maintain a nationally representative sample of American households (with tens of thousands of participants at any point in time), known as the Knowledge Panel (for well over a decade now). The scale and quality of the Knowledge Panel enables measurement of the opinions of the nation as a whole as well as the opinions of important subpopulations. The Internet interface allows participants not just to respond to questions but also to react to visual stimuli, yielding real-time Knowledge Panel responses to, e.g., presidential debates or proposals to improve public health. Polimetrix (PM) similarly maintains a large survey panel of Americans, but, unlike KN, PM recruits subjects through multiple means that imply non-representative samples. Professor Rivers developed and implemented a range of population matching techniques – see, e.g., “Combining Random & Non-Random Samples,” Proceedings of the American Statistical Association 2003 (with Vicki Pineau and Daniel Slotwiner) – that allow PM panels to simulate samples representative of the population. Whereas recruitment & maintenance of KN panels entail considerable expense, PM panels can simulate similar datasets at a fraction of the cost. PM, with Rivers’ population-matching techniques, provides unique research opportunities by enabling representative large-sample analysis of small areas (such as congressional districts). Through KN and PM and their associated methodological breakthroughs, Professor Rivers has done perhaps more than anyone to transform survey research in the last twenty years. Few, if any scholars, have ever had this kind of impact in the field of survey research.
 
Professor Rivers has also been an early and influential member of the Society, has won the AAPOR Innovator’s Award and Research Business Report’s Market Executive of the Year, and has served on the Boards of the American National Election Studies, the Roper Center, Preview Systems, and the CBS News Decision Desk.
 

The prize will be formally awarded at the APSA 2015 Business Meeting of the Political Methodology Section.

Please join me in thanking the award committee for their work.  



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Kevin Quinn
Professor of Law
UC Berkeley School of Law
490 Simon #7200
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA  94720-7200
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President 
The Society for Political Methodology
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