2012 Political Methodology Career Achievement Award Winner: Henry E. Brady (University of California, Berkeley)

                Citation: We are pleased to announce that Henry Brady (University of California, Berkeley) has been selected as the recipient of the 2012 Political Methodology 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, John Jackson, Gary King, and James Stimson.
Professor Brady has published 10 books, 2 monographs, and over 70 journal articles and book chapters. He is currently Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy and has directed the Survey Research Center at Berkeley. His research makes important contributions to the subfield of political methodology and political science more broadly.
Professor Brady has made huge contributions in a variety of fields; we do him the injustice of only highlighting a few of most relevance to The Society. His early work on scaling put multi-dimensional scaling into a statistical framework (path breaking in 1985) and then dealt with critical issues related to scaling data where the scale scores were not interpersonally comparable and to the statistical assessment of ranking data, where respondents rank all candidates in a primary. The latter work was related to Professor Brady's research on American primaries, where he was interested in questions of how primary-election voters make choices in a low information environment and the role of strategic issues in that decision. This work was extended to election studies (particularly of Canada) where Professor Brady and collaborators took advantage of new technology (computer assisted telephone interviewing, new in 1990) to study the effect of emerging issues in elections and changes over the course of an electoral campaign. Professor Brady was one of the first scholars to work with the rolling cross-section design and take good advantage of that design by using techniques that allowed for almost overnight changes in parts of the survey instrument.
In a different series of work, Professor Brady (along with Sidney Verba and Kay Schlozman) did landmark studies of American political participation. The methodological innovation was to study "serious participation" via surveys, a difficult thing to do since most Americans do not participate in a serious way. A huge survey (15,000 respondents) was conducted, of which about 2500 "serious participators" were selected for more-intensive interviews. This, and the more recent book by the same authors, allowed the authors to assess the enormous inequalities in American participation. Professor Brady (along with Cynthia Kaplan) also did innovative survey research in the former Soviet Union, providing a credible view of the dynamics of voting in the post-Soviet transition.
Professor Brady (in collaboration with David Collier) has recently been involved in trying to marry the best parts of qualitative and quantitative analysis and to come up with a new paradigm for what is good research in political science. This has spawned an interesting dialogue and opened up many new avenues of discussion. Professor Brady has pursued this important task in the book with Collier, a co-edited methodological handbook, and his Presidential address to the American Political Science Association.
Professor Brady has served important leadership roles in the Society for Political Methodology including President (2009-2010) and Vice President (2006-2007) of APSA and President of the Political Methodology Society (1992-1993). He won the Gosnell Prize for the Best Paper in Political Methodology in 2003-2004. Professor Brady was a central figure in the creation of the Society, helping to secure grant funding for the first two summer conferences. He was one of the co-PIs on the initial submission to the National Science Foundation that led to more sustained funding for the summer political methodology conferences. He has been a regular participant at the summer meetings since the Society's founding. He also serves on the editorial board for the Society's journal, Political Analysis.
Submitted by the Selection Committee: Sara McLaughlin Mitchell (chair), Gary King, Suzanna Linn, Jasjeet S. Sekhon, and Curtis S. Signorino. (The prize will be formally awarded at the APSA 2012 Business Meeting of the Political Methodology Section.)
Please join the committee and me in congratulating Henry!



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                Robert (Rob) J. Franzese, Jr.
         Professor, Department of Political Science,
  Research Professor, Center for Political Studies, I.S.R.,
            The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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      President, The Society for Political Methodology
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           Room 4246 Institute for Social Research
        P.O. Box 1248 (for courier: 426 Thompson St.)
                   Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1248
         office: 1-734-936-1850; fax: 1-734-764-3341
           http://www-personal.umich.edu/~franzese
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