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David Collier

Chancellor's Professor Emeritus
Email
Website
Phone
510 642-8168
Office
550 Social Sciences Building
Personal Statement

David Collier’s work focuses on research methods, comparative politics, and Latin America. 

 

                                Selected Research Projects

CRITICAL JUNCTURES

CONCEPTS AND MEASUREMENT

PROCESS TRACING

CAUSAL INFERENCE

BERKELEY PROJECT ON QCA/SET-THEORETIC COMPARATIVE METHODS

​ARTICLES BY OTHER AUTHORS

WIKIPEDIA PAGE

AMAZON AUTHOR PAGE

GOOGLE SCHOLAR PAGE

CV

CAREER

David Collier's research focuses on political methodology, including concept analysis, qualitative methods, and strategies of multi-method investigation. His current work is concerned with the challenges of integrating case-study and medium-N analysis.

Throughout his career, Collier has also studied democracy and authoritarianism, regime transitions, labor politics, party system dynamics, and class coalitions -- focusing primarily on Latin America. Shaping the Political Arena (1991, 2002, coauthored with Ruth Berins Collier), was one of the first extended, historical analyses of critical junctures and path dependence to be published in political science. Corresponding to these substantive interests, Collier's work on concept analysis includes numerous examples from the literature on democracy, authoritarianism, and regime change.

At Berkeley, Collier has been Chair of both the Political Science Department and the Center for Latin American Studies, and he was the founding Co-Director of the Berkeley-Stanford Program in Latin American Studies. He has served as President of the APSA Comparative Politics Section, Vice President of APSA, and was the founding President of the APSA Section for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research. He played an active role in building the Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, an international training program at Syracuse University. Collier is centrally involved in training scholars in the fields of Latin American politics, comparative politics, and methodology. He won Berkeley’s campus-wide Distinguished Faculty Mentor Award, as well as the Powell Graduate Student Mentoring Award of the APSA Comparative Politics Section.

Collier has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2014 he was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science for his lifetime contribution to the discipline.

 

PROFESSIONAL RECOGNITION AND AWARDS

  • Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science: 2014
  • Frank J. Goodnow Award for Distinguished Service to Political Science and the American Political Science Association: 2014
  • Powell Award for Graduate Student Mentoring, APSA Comparative Politics Section: 2013
  • Elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science: 2010.
  • Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: 2003.
  • Inauguration of “David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award,” APSA Organized Section for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research: 2010.
  • Distinguished Faculty Mentor Award, University of California, Berkeley (campus-wide award for graduate mentoring): 2005.
Research Interests
Democracy and Authoritarianism
Latin America
Concept Analysis
Qualitative Methods
Multi-Method Research
Comparative Politics
Degrees
B.A., Harvard University
M.A. and Ph.D., University of Chicago
Articles
  1. Articles and Symposia

Letters from the President, Newsletter of the APSA Organized Section for Comparative Politics