David Collier
Professor of Political Science
Phone: (510) 642-8168
Office Location: 550 Barrows
Office Hours: After Class and By Appt.
Summer 2009 Course: Not teaching in Political Science this term
Curriculum Vitae
David Collier’s fields are comparative politics, Latin American politics, and methodology. His recent co-edited and co-authored methodological work includes Concepts and Method in Social Science: The Tradition of Giovanni Sartori (Routledge, 2009); The Oxford Handbook of Political Methodology (Oxford, 2008); and Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). Statistical Models and Causal Inference: A Dialogue with the Social Sciences, co-edited with Jasjeet Sekhon and Philip B. Stark, brings together many articles in applied statistics by the late Berkeley statistician David A. Freedman and is appearing with Cambridge in 2009. Collier is engaged in ongoing projects 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 (co-authored with Ruth Berins Collier – Princeton, 1991; reissued by Notre Dame, 2002); The New Authoritarianism in Latin America (Princeton, 1979); and Squatters and Oligarchs: Authoritarian Rule and Policy Change in Peru (Johns Hopkins, 1976). He is co-editor 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 combine a focus on methods with his interest in the analytic problems that arise in studying democracy, authoritarianism, and regime change. His articles include “Typologies: Forming Categories and Creating Categorical Variables” (with LaPorte and Seawright – Oxford Handbook of Political Science, 2008); “Essentially Contested Concepts: Debates and Applications” (with Hidalgo and Maciuceanu – Journal of Political Ideologies, 2006); “Toward a Pluralistic Vision of Methodology” (with Brady and Seawright – Political Analysis, 2006); “Measurement Validity: A Shared Standard for Qualitative and Quantitative Research” (with Adcock – American Political Science Review, 2001); “Democracy and Dichotomies: A Pragmatic Approach to Choices About Concepts” (with Adcock – Annual Review of Political Science, 1999); and “Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research” (with Levitsky – World Politics, 1997).
At Berkeley, Collier has been Chair and Acting Chair of Political Science, as well as Chair of the Center for Latin American Studies and Co-Director of the Berkeley-Stanford Program in Latin American Studies. He has served as President of the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, has been a Vice President of APSA, and was the Founding President of the APSA Organized Section for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research. He has played an active role in training scholars in the fields of Latin American politics and comparative politics, and he has won Berkeley’s campus-wide Distinguished Faculty Mentor Award.
Collier has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.