State of Democracy Lecture: Larry Bartels and Chris Achen

Democracy for Realists

Respondents: Elizabeth Cohen and Matt Cleary

Chris Achen's research interest is Political Methodology, particularly in its application to empirical democratic theory, American Politics, and International Relations. He is the author of two books, Interpreting and Using Regression and The Statistical Analysis of Quasi-Experiments, co-author of a third, Cross-Level Inference, and co-editor of a fourth book, The European Union Decides. His next book is entitled Voter Turnout in Multi-Level Systems.  Professor Achen was the first president of the Political Methodology Section of the American Political Science Association, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Science Foundation, and Princeton's Center for the Study of Democratic Politics. He received the first career achievement award from The Political Methodology Section of The American Political Science Association in 2007. He is also the recipient of an award from the University of Michigan for lifetime achievement in training graduate students. Recent academic placements of graduate students for whom he was the principal dissertation advisor include Stanford, Duke, and the London School of Economics.

Bartels joined the Vanderbilt faculty in 2011. His scholarly work focuses on public opinion, electoral politics, public policy, and political representation. His 2008 book, Unequal Democracy, appeared on a New York Times list of “economics books of the year” and won the Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the year’s best book on U.S. national policy. He is also the author of Presidential Primaries and the Dynamics of Public Choice (1988), which won the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for the year’s best book on government, politics, or international affairs, and co-editor of Mass Politics in Tough Times (with Nancy Bermeo, 2014) and Campaign Reform (with Lynn Vavreck, 2000). Bartels has served as vice president of the American Political Science Association and president of its Political Methodology section, chair of the Board of Overseers of the American National Election Studies, and founding director of Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Democratic Politics. He is currently a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation and an occasional contributor to the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog. In 2014 he received the Warren E. Miller Prize for an outstanding career of intellectual accomplishment and service to the profession in the field of elections, public opinion, and voting behavior. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the National Academy of Sciences.