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Nathaniel (Neal) Beck (New York University)
Citation
We are pleased to announce Neal Beck as the recipient of the 2011 Society for Political Methodology's Career Achievement Award. This award recognizes an outstanding career of intellectual accomplishment and service to the profession in the field of Political Methodology. Chris Achen, John Jackson, James Stimson, and Gary King were the first four award winners. All of these scholars gave the field new methodological tools, and all five built and sustained institutions for the field.
Beck's work on time-series has improved the analysis of time series and panel data across the social sciences. His work with Jonathan Katz on panel-corrected-standard errors created now-standard parts of the toolkit of econometrics, and is included in the major econometric texts and packages. Beck made important arguments about serial correlation, that it is not just a nuisance term requiring correction to gain efficiency, but is a form of substantive misspecification. He pushed scholars to think about the dynamic process that yielded the serial correlation as an outcome.
Beck edited Political Analysis from 1999 to 2003. Through a uniquely creative style, and incredible hard work, Beck made an enormous contribution as editor of Political Analysis. He revitalized the journal, convinced reviewers to contribute more effort, and took authors and their papers to the next level in terms of quality and effort. As a direct result of his work and others, Political Analysis is now the single most influential journal in the discipline. Beck was also the treasurer and vice president of the Society for Political Methodology, putting the institution on a firm financial footing, and is an ever present (and persistent!) voice for quality.
Beck has won the Gosnell Prize for the Best Paper in Political Methodology twice. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is an Inaugural Fellow of the Society for Political Methodology.