R. Michael Alvarez, Caltech's Flintridge Foundation Professor of Political and Computational Social Science, has won the Society for Political Methodology's Career Achievement Award for his research into modeling election dynamics and his service to the profession. The Society for Political Methodology, founded in 1983 as a section of the American Political Science Association, is, according to its website, "the world's premier academic organization for quantitative political science, addressing the needs of a global membership base united in developing and establishing empirical tools for the study of politics."
Alvarez has a long association with the society. "The society has grown dramatically over the past four decades. It started off when I was a grad student with just a couple of dozen people coming to the annual meeting and maybe a handful of grad students," Alvarez says. "Now there are hundreds of people who come to the meeting, and the society has grown to have regional conferences."
Alvarez attended graduate school at Duke University. "I had a group of mentors there who were really able to facilitate my quantitative and mathematical approaches to studying political science. John Aldrich [now the Pfizer-Pratt University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Duke] in particular, who was my advisor and mentor, connected me to the society and suggested that I go to its meetings. It really was instrumental in my professional and intellectual development," Alvarez says.
If the society gave to Alvarez, he was quick to give back. Along with Caltech's Jonathan Katz, the Kay Sugahara Professor of Social Sciences and Statistics, who won the society's career achievement award last year, Alvarez edited the society's journal, Political Analysis, from 2010 to 2017. One of the most important innovations they made as editors of Political Analysis was to require contributors to submit their datasets and computer code along with their manuscripts. "We always had a policy that people's work should be reproducible," Alvarez says. "Not only did we require it, we had a doctoral student here at Caltech who would take the code and data for every article and run the code to make sure that it actually worked and produced the results reported in the article."
Alvarez and Katz also pioneered a social media profile for the journal. "We were one of the early adopters on Twitter, and we attended annual meetings with other journal editors, offering presentations on why editors should be using social media and why it is important to have a strong online presence," Alvarez says.
Alvarez knew from his undergraduate years that he was interested in applying quantitative methods to the study of political behavior in the United States. "With quantitative methods we can ask and answer significant questions, not only about American political behavior, which is what I do, but about why international wars begin or what causes ethnic conflict," Alvarez explains. "Many questions and theories are amenable to testing with data. And over the years, as data have become more central to the world we live in, so much information has become available. The role of quantitative analysis in political science, but also in other social sciences, has just grown exponentially."
As co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project and host of the Election Science Office Hours podcast, Alvarez has been instrumental in analyzing and enhancing voting technologies to secure free and fair elections. With Frederick Eberhardt, professor of philosophy at Caltech, Alvarez also co-directs the Linde Center for Science, Society, and Policy (LCSSP), which brings together the worlds of scientific research and scientific policy and ethics, creating conversations within academia and outside it to understand impacts of cutting-edge scientific research and potential regulatory policies. From generative artificial intelligence to conspiratorial thinking to engineered microbes, Alvarez inspires collaborations across many disciplines.
Jeff Gill, director of the Center for Data Science at American University and a distinguished professor of government, mathematics, and statistics, describes Alvarez as "an amazing and long-term contributor to our knowledge of political methodology and elections. He has contributed important work that is considered seminal in the field. I am also humbled and grateful to say that he has been an important influence on me."
The Society for Political Methodology cites Alvarez for his "foundational contributions to the study of public opinion, voting behavior, election administration, and computational modeling," and for his leadership "in promoting transparency and rigor in political science" and his "commitment to supporting junior scholars."
"I was thrilled to receive this award," Alvarez says.
