I am very pleased to announce that this year we have a winner and an honorable mention for the Society for Political Methodology Poster Award. This award is given for the best poster presented at the Annual Summer Meeting—in this case the 2014 Meeting.
The winner is Dean Knox of MIT for his “Identifying Peer Effects under Homophily with an Instrumental Variable: Patronage and Promotion in the Chinese Bureaucracy”.
The award committee (Arthur Spirling (chair), Christina Boyd, Devin Caughey, Wendy Tam Cho, Neil Malhotra, Margaret Roberts, and Teppei Yamamoto) had this to say about the winning poster:
Knox's poster is impressive on several levels. First, to undertake his analysis, he has gathered---mostly via web-scraping---an extraordinarily rich data set on the relationship between Chinese local officials: including their educational backgrounds and histories in various positions. His primary concern is whether individuals are promoted within the bureaucracy due to their pre-existing connections to others that hold senior posts, or whether in fact, such career patterns can be explained by the less worrying notion of homophily: i.e. that similar people end up doing similar things due to their underlying preferences and latent types. This is, of course, a classical problem in network analysis. He suggests a clever design that relies on retirements---and thus empty slots into which individuals may be promoted---and that uses randomization inference to asses the relative contribution of network effects. Ultimately, he finds that being part of more prestigious networks causes mayors to have a greater probability of promotion. We found this to be a thoughtful, careful and interesting poster on a fascinating topic, supported by data that will bear fruit for both him and political science as a whole in the future. He richly deserves this award.
The Honorable Mention goes to Dorothy Kronick of Stanford for her “Ecological Inference with Vote-Share Data”.
Please join me in congratulating both Dean and Dorothy on this honor.
Finally, let me thank the award committee for their excellent 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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