Dear Society members and friends,

It is my pleasure to announce that the winner of the Society for Political
Methodology's 2016 Emerging Scholar Award winner is Rocio Titiunik.  The
emerging scholar award  honors a young researcher, within ten years of
their degree, who is making notable contributions to the field of political
methodology.  Please join me in congratulating Rocio.

My thanks to prize committee members Josh Clinton (Chair, Vanderbilt), Adam
Berinsky (MIT), Jens Heinmueller (Stanford), and Jas Sekhon (Berkeley).
Their citation for the award follows:

"The members of the Emerging Scholars Award Committee consisting of
Adam Belinsky, Jens Heinmueller, Jas Sekhon, and Josh Clinton (Chair)
are pleased to announce that the 2016 Emerging Scholar Award for the
Society of Political Methodology is Rocio Titiunik of the University
of Michigan.  Since receiving her Ph.D. in 2009, Rocio has made
several important and notable contributions to the study of political
methodology, most focusing on methods devoted to identifying causal
effects.

Perhaps her most impressive paper is her wonderful Econometrica paper
on RD methods. In the standard RD framework, identification depends on
the continuity of conditional expectation functions and bandwidth
selection is of critical importance. Rocio and her co-authors fully
develop the statistical theory and methods to estimate confidence
intervals that have the correct coverage using a mean-squared error
bandwidth selector. Her paper introduced the only RD estimator that
recovered the experimental benchmark in the Finish election data
(where they do actually randomized tied elections) in a paper written
by different, independent authors and the software she developed to
implement the procedure makes her contribution accessible to scholars
doing with with RD designs.

Another one of her many interesting papers is her paper in the
American Political Science Review that carefully examines how one
should evaluate whether natural circumstances can be interpreted as a
natural experiment. This thoughtful and nuanced paper is both a
sustained critique of natural experiments and call to use them
correctly which will again help political scientists in their work to
identify effects of interest.

Because of work such as this, we enthusiastically and unanimously
commend Rocio for her many excellent contributions to both the field
of political methodology and the larger discipline as well."

A formal presentation of the award will be made at the Methodology
Section's business meeting at APSA (September 2nd at noon).

Best,

Jeff Lewis


-- 

Jeffrey B. Lewis
Professor and Chair
Department of Political Science
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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