Caltech Professor Wins Career Achievement Award in Political Methodology

Jonathan N. Katz, Caltech’s Kay Sugahara Professor of Social Sciences and Statistics, has won the Society for Political Methodology’s Career Achievement Award for his research into modeling election dynamics. 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.”

Katz has been a member of the society since the 1990s, although he began applying quantitative methods to the study of politics during his final year of undergraduate studies at MIT in the late 1980s, when he shifted his focus from applied mathematics to the field of political economy—the study of how individuals, governments, and markets influence one another. “I’d always been involved in politics. I made money in college writing database software for campaigns to track their expenses and their FEC [Federal Election Commission] reports,” he recalls, “and I was active in student politics, serving as the undergraduate student body president at MIT.”

The field of political science was on the edge of a methodological revolution when Katz first arrived on the scene. “Quantitative work was already big in economics, but it was not yet a major element in political science,” Katz says. He was one of the key researchers to move this ongoing revolution forward. Gary King, the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard and director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, elaborates: “The most important development in academia over the past decades is that large parts of the social sciences are being pulled out of the humanities, where academics are scholars but not scientists, and being put into the sciences, where participants develop methods, make discoveries, solve problems, evaluate public policies, optimize political processes, and make huge contributions to the world.”

These new cutting-edge quantitative methodologies for understanding politics fascinated Katz and shaped his subsequent work first as a doctoral student at UC San Diego and later as a postdoc at Harvard. Katz joined the Caltech faculty in 1995.

Katz is perhaps best known in the field for his work with Nathaniel Beck, professor of politics and public policy at NYU, which corrected a prior method of analyzing data in comparative politics that allowed for more refined and accurate political prognostication.

Katz has served as co-director and now as a member of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, which was established by the presidents of Caltech and MIT in December 2000 to ensure that the controversies surrounding vote counting in the state of Florida that affected the US presidential election that year would not recur. The Voting Technology Project is now co-directed by Mike Alvarez, Caltech’s Flintridge Foundation Professor of Political and Computational Social Science, who worked for eight years alongside Katz as co-editor of the Society for Political Methodology’s journal Political Analysis.

Katz has also acted as an expert consulting on election law cases, including several that rose to the level of the US Supreme Court, including the 2003 Georgia v. Ashcroft case and the 2016 Bethune-Hill v. Virginia State Board of Elections case, both of which dealt with state legislatures gerrymandering political districts to disfavor African American voters. Katz has also filed several amici curiae briefs on the proper tests to apply to judge whether state legislatures have engaged in partisan gerrymandering to favor one political party over another.

“To do successful research in political science, you need people who have detailed quantitative knowledge about political realities and people with highly technical statistical skills,” King says. “You need both of these kinds of people in the room. And Jonathan Katz in the room all by himself is both of those kinds of people. There are very few people that have that overlap, who are equally conversant in the substantive knowledge of politics and the ability to innovate the necessary statistics to solve particular problems associated with forecasting or analyzing elections.”

Katz is pleased to have received the career achievement award from the Society for Political Methodology, but remarked, “I didn’t think I was quite old enough to win now!”