John Aldrich is Pfizer-Pratt University Professor of Political Science at Duke University. He specializes in American politics and political behavior, formal theory, and methodology. Books he has authored or co-authored include Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America (1995), Linear Probability, Logit and Probit Models (1984), Before the Convention (1980), and a series of books on elections, the most recent of which is Change and Continuity in the 2004 Elections. His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Public Choice, and other journals and edited volumes. He has received grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has served as co-editor of the American Journal of Political Science and as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and at the Rockefeller Center, Bellagio. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Current projects include studies of various aspects of campaigns and elections, political parties, the political effects of economic globalization, and Congress.
Arthur Lupia is Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. He examines how information and institutions affect policy and politics with a particular focus on how people make decisions when they lack information. His work provides insights on voting, civic competence, legislative-bureaucratic relations, parliamentary governance, and the role of the media and the Internet in politics. He is co-author of two books, The Democratic Dilemma: Can Citizens Learn What They Need to Know? (1998) and Stealing the Initiative: How State Government Reacts to Direct Democracy (2001), and co-editor of Elements of Reason: Cognition, Choice, and the Bounds of Rationality (2000). His articles appear in leading political science, economics, and law journals. He is the recipient of the 1998 Award for Initiatives in Research from the National Academy of Sciences. He spent academic year 1999-2000 as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. In 2003, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is Principal Investigator of two large interdisciplinary data collection projects, the American National Election Studies (since 2005) and Time-shared Experiments for the Social Sciences project (TESS, since 2001). Both are innovative NSF-sponsored program that allow scientists from many disciplines conduct innovative research on nationally-representative subject pools.
Kenneth Schultz is Associate Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. His research examines how domestic political factors such as elections, party competition, and public opinion influence decisions to use force in international disputes and efforts to negotiate the end of international rivalries. He also has a project, supported by the National Science Foundation, on testing the empirical implications of game theoretic models of crisis bargaining. He is the author of Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy (2001), as well as numerous articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Professor Schultz is the recipient of several awards, including the 2003 Karl Deutsch Award, given by the International Studies Association to a scholar under the age of 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to the study of international relations and peace research.
Jeffrey Lewis is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. His interests include political methodology, American elections, formal theory, and legislative institutions. He is currently engaged in research on the analysis of roll calling voting, the analysis of individual-level ballot data, and the analysis of international crisis bargaining. He has also written on direct democracy, models of voting behavior, and methods of ecological inference in such journals as the Journal of Political Economy, Political Analysis, and Historical Methodology.
Scott de Marchi is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. He specializes in the fields of computational political Economy and other mathematical methods, individual decision-making, the presidency, and public policy. The glue that holds these interests together is a fascination with strategic action under conditions of incomplete information. Instead of postulating that everything about a game is known a priori, his work focuses on situations in which agents use limited resources to learn as they go along. He also maintains an active interest in mathematical methods, especially insofar as these fields reflect upon human and artificial intelligence Ii.e., induction and analogy-making, classification problems, algoithms for solving extensive game forms, etc.). His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, and he has published articles in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Journal of Theoretical Politics, and Public Choice. His first book on the foundations of mathematical methods in the social sciences, Computational and Mathematical Modeling in the Social Sciences, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2005. He was appointed a Fellow-at-Large by the Santa Fe Institute in 1999, and is a faculty member of the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute.
James H. Fowler is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California , San Diego in July. His interests span political science, behavioral economics, quantitative sociology, and evolutionary biology. The main theme that unifies his work is an interest in the collective action problem. Standard formal theory approaches to human behavior that rely on the assumption that individuals are self-interested and rational typically have great difficulty explaining why individuals cooperate with one another or provide public goods in large populations. James' work focuses on alternative explanations for collective action that combine rigorous formal theory with tenable assumptions about human behavior drawn from empirical results in sociology, behavioral psychology, and experimental economics. Some of his recent research and publications include: "Connecting the Congress: A Study of Cosponsorship Networks" forthcoming in Political Analysis , "Altruistic Punishment and the Origin of Cooperation" (2005) in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , and "Altruism and Turnout" in the Journal of Politics (2006). He also has written a book "Mandates, Parties, and Voters: How Elections Shape the Future" (with Oleg Smirnov) which is forthcoming at Temple University Press.
Daniel Posner is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He studies ethnic politics and the political economy of development in Africa. His first book, Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa (Cambridge), explains why and when politics revolves around one dimension of ethnic cleavage rather than another. Dr. Posner teaches courses on comparative politics, African politics, the political economy of development, and research design. He is a founding member of the inter-university Laboratory in Comparative Ethnic Processes (LiCEP) and the founder and co-convener of the Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE). His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, the British Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Democracy. He has been a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and a Carnegie Scholar of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.