David Collier
Professor of Political Science
Phone: (510) 642-8168
Office Location: 550 Barrows
Office Hours: Tu 6-7 & by appt.
Spring 2008 Course: PS191-6 Junior Seminar: Contested Concepts -- "Democracy, Torture, and Many Others",
PS239-2 "Framing Research: Concepts, Measurement, and Causal Inference"
Curriculum Vitae
David Collier's fields are comparative politics, Latin American politics, and methodology. His latest book is Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), of which he is co-editor and co-author with his Berkeley colleague Henry E. Brady. Collier is engaged in ongoing projects with Brady on the challenges of integrating quantitative and qualitative methods, and of using this integrated perspective to gain new leverage in conceptualization, measurement, and causal inference.
Collier's work on Latin America includes Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America (Princeton, 1991; reissued by Notre Dame, 2002), co-authored with Ruth Berins Collier; The New Authoritarianism in Latin America (Princeton 1979), of which he is editor and co-author; and Squatters and Oligarchs: Authoritarian Rule and Policy Change in Peru (1976). He was co-editor, with Gerardo L. Munck, of "Regimes and Democracy in Latin America," a special issue of the journal Studies in Comparative International Development (2001).
A number of Collier's methodological articles have combined a focus on methods with his interest in the analytic problems that arise in studying democracy, authoritarianism, and regime change. These articles include "Measurement Validity: A Shared Standard for Qualitative and Quantitative Research" (American Political Science Review, 2001) and "Democracy and Dichotomies: A Pragmatic Approach to Choices About Concepts" (Annual Review of Political Science, 1999), both written with Robert Adcock; "Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research" (World Politics, 1997), with Steven Levitsky; and "Trajectory of a Concept: Corporatism in the Study of Latin American Politics" (1995).
Collier has been Chair (1990-93) and Acting Chair (2003) of Political Science at UC Berkeley, as well as Chair (1980-83) of the Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies. From 1997-99 he served as President of the Comparative Politics Section, American Political Science Association; he was Vice President of APSA in 2001-02; and in 2002-03 he was Founding Transitional President of the new APSA Qualitative Methods Section. Collier has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.