Princeton faculty member Larry Bartels has been inducted into the American Academy of Political and Social Science as the Robert A. Dahl Fellow.
Bartels is the Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public and International Affairs, with appointments in both the politics department and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He also is the director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics.
Fellows are selected by the academy for their outstanding contributions to the social sciences and their sustained efforts to communicate their research beyond academia to the policymaking world and public. The academy recognized Bartels for his extensive work on American electoral politics, public opinion and political accountability.
At a ceremony in May at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., Bartels was inducted by his Woodrow Wilson School colleague, Alan Krueger, the Bendheim Professor in Economics and Public Policy and the academy's Theodore Roosevelt Fellow.
"He uses empirical research to examine, in his words, 'whether democracy works as advertised,'" said Krueger, who is currently on public service leave as assistant secretary for economic policy and chief economist for the U.S. Treasury. "Larry's work runs from the theoretical to the applied, from evaluating quasi instrumental variables to discovering uncomfortable facts that don't fit with popular beliefs. He is also one of the few political scientists I know who attends the econometrics workshop at Princeton."
Six other scholars also were inducted: Rebecca Blank of the U.S. Department of Commerce; Kitty Calavita of the University of California-Irvine; Sheldon Danziger of the Ford School of Public Policy at University of Michigan; and Carol Dweck, Paula England and Mark Granovetter of Stanford University.
Douglas Massey, the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School and president of the academy, described the scholars as having "used the power of their intellects and their cutting-edge research to address questions of great importance," according to a post on the academy's blog. "Does democracy work as advertised?" he said. "Are we using the right measures to know how many Americans are living in poverty? Do prisoners understand their right to voice grievances? How has welfare reform affected children and youth? How do the mindsets of children affect their ability to deal with setbacks and failure? Are there gender gaps in pay arising from the sex segregation of occupations? And how does the power of social networks affect individuals' abilities to manage their worlds and succeed economically?"
Bartels earned his Ph.D. in political science at the University of California-Berkeley in 1983 and has served on the Princeton faculty since 1991. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995. Bartels served as chair of the national Task Force on Campaign Reform that produced the volume "Campaign Reform: Insights and Evidence," co-edited with Lynn Vavreck of the University of California-Los Angeles. In 2001, he served as the nonpartisan member of the New Jersey Legislative Apportionment Commission and was a defendant in a major federal voting rights case, Page v. Bartels.
A transcript and podcast of Bartels' acceptance speech is posted on the academy's blog.
