David Collier (born February 17, 1942) is an American
political scientist
Political science is the scientific study of politics. It is a social science dealing with systems of governance and power, and the analysis of political activities, political thought, political behavior, and associated constitutions and la ...
specializing in
comparative politics
Comparative politics is a field in political science characterized either by the use of the ''comparative method'' or other empirical methods to explore politics both within and between countries. Substantively, this can include questions relatin ...
. He is Chancellor's Professor Emeritus at the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
. He works in the fields of comparative politics, Latin American politics, and methodology. His father was the anthropologist
Donald Collier Donald Collier (May 1, 1911 – January 23, 1995) was an archaeologist, ethnologist, and museologist. He was known primarily for his work in Ecuadorian and Andean archaeology and spent most of his career at the Field Museum of Natural History.
Fa ...
.
[Sullivan, R. (1995, February 11). Donald Collier, museum curator and Chicago anthropologist, 83. ''New York Times''. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/11/obituaries/donald-collier-museum-curator-and-chicago-anthropologist-83.html]
Biography
Collier was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1942. He has a B.A. from
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...
in 1965, and a Ph.D. in political science from the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...
in 1971.
After receiving his PhD, Collier taught at
Indiana University, Bloomington
Indiana University Bloomington (IU Bloomington, Indiana University, IU, or simply Indiana) is a public research university in Bloomington, Indiana. It is the flagship campus of Indiana University and, with over 40,000 students, its largest campu ...
, where he was promoted from Assistant to Associate Professor in 197
He joined the Political Science Department at Berkeley in 197
At Berkeley, Collier has been Chair of the Political Science Department and of the Center for Latin American Studies, and he was founding Co-Director of the Berkeley-Stanford Program in Latin American Studies. At Berkeley he was centrally involved in training scholars in the fields of Latin American politics, comparative politics, and methodology, and he won Berkeley’s campus-wide Distinguished Faculty Mentor Awar
Collier has served as President of the Comparative Politics Section,
American Political Science Association (APSA); has been a Vice President of APSA; and was the founding President of the APSA Organized Section for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research. Collier has played an active role in building the Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (IQMR), an international training program held annually at Syracuse Universit
Collier received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) is an interdisciplinary research lab at Stanford University that offers a residential postdoctoral fellowship program for scientists and scholars studying "the five core social and ...
.
Awards and honors
* 1993 Collier’s book ''Shaping the Political Arena'' (1991) won the Best Book Prize of the APSA Comparative Politics Section.
* 2004 Member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...
br>
* 2011 Elected Fellow of the
American Association for the Advancement of Sciencebr>
* 2013 Powell Award for Graduate Student Mentoring, APSA Comparative Politics Sectio
* 2014
Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science
), location=Uppsala, Sweden, date=
The Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science ( sv, Skytteanska priset) was established in 1995 by the Johan Skytte Foundation at Uppsala University. The foundation itself goes back to the donation in 1622 from J ...
br>
* 2014 Frank J. Goodnow Award for Distinguished Service to Political Science and the American Political Science Associatio
The "David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award," of the APSA Organized Section for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, was named after Collier in 201
Academic research
Collier was initially known for his work on Latin American politics. In the second half of his career, he focused on methodology. Following his retirement from teaching, he returned to the topic of critical junctures and co-edited ''Critical Junctures and Historical Legacies: Insights and Methods for Comparative Social Science'' (2022).
Comparative politics and Latin America
A first strand of Collier’s work focuses on Latin American politics and the broader field of comparative politics. This early work includes quantitative cross-national research on political regimes,
corporatism
Corporatism is a collectivist political ideology which advocates the organization of society by corporate groups, such as agricultural, labour, military, business, scientific, or guild associations, on the basis of their common interests. The ...
, and social policy, as well as an exploration of the links between regime change and public policy toward squatter settlements in Peru, which was published as ''Squatters and Oligarchs: Authoritarian Rule and Policy Change in Peru'' (1976). His two major works on Latin American politics are his edited volume ''The New Authoritarianism in Latin America'' (1979), and his coauthored ''Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America'' (1991).
''The New Authoritarianism in Latin America''
In ''The New Authoritarianism in Latin America'' (1979), Collier and several leading scholars in the field, such as
Guillermo O'Donnell
Guillermo Alberto O'Donnell Ure (February 24, 1936 – November 29, 2011) was a prominent Argentine political scientist, specializing in comparative politics, who spent most of his career working in Argentina and the United States, and who m ...
,
Albert O. Hirschman, and
Fernando Henrique Cardoso
Fernando Henrique Cardoso (; born 18 June 1931), also known by his initials FHC (), is a Brazilian sociologist, professor and politician who served as the 34th president of Brazil from 1 January 1995 to 31 December 2002. He was the first Brazi ...
, explore alternative explanations for the rise of
authoritarianism
Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political ''status quo'', and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voti ...
in
Latin America
Latin America or
* french: Amérique Latine, link=no
* ht, Amerik Latin, link=no
* pt, América Latina, link=no, name=a, sometimes referred to as LatAm is a large cultural region in the Americas where Romance languages — languages derived f ...
in the 1960s and 1970s. This work brought the literature on Latin American politics in dialogue with the
modernization theory dominant in comparative politics at the time. Focusing on the fact that the most industrialized Latin American countries were not the more democratic ones, it articulated several critiques of the prevailing view of Third World politics put forth by modernization theorists (e.g.,
Seymour Martin Lipset
Seymour Martin Lipset ( ; March 18, 1922 – December 31, 2006) was an American sociologist and political scientist (President of the American Political Science Association). His major work was in the fields of political sociology, trade union o ...
). Thus, at a time when comparative politics sought to provide a general theory of politics in a way that largely disregarded insights developed by regional experts, Collier’s ''New Authoritarianism'' provided an alternative, demonstrating that
area studies
Area studies (also known as regional studies) are interdisciplinary fields of research and scholarship pertaining to particular geographical, national/ federal, or cultural regions. The term exists primarily as a general description for what ...
could be a site of creative theorizing. Consequently, ''The New Authoritarianism in Latin America'' was a landmark study in the literature on national political regimes and in the study of politics in Latin America, and is one of the most cited political science texts on this region.
''Shaping the Political Arena''
Collier's most sweeping work on Latin America, the fruit of over a decade of research, is ''Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America'' (1991), coauthored with Ruth Berins Collier. This major work makes two fundamental theoretical contributions. The first concerns the linked ideas of (a)
critical junctures, periods of crucial change in the history of given countries or other political units that are hypothesized to leave distinctive legacies, and (b)
path dependence
Path dependence is a concept in economics and the social sciences, referring to processes where past events or decisions constrain later events or decisions. It can be used to refer to outcomes at a single point in time or to long-run equilibria ...
, the trajectories of change stemming from and constrained by critical junctures. These were, in one sense, not new ideas. The distinctive contribution of ''Shaping the Political Arena'' was to turn these ideas into a carefully formulated model directly relevant to research in comparative politics; and to then offer a magisterial application of this model to Latin American cases. This book was the first, and still remains, one of the most systematic formulations and applications of critical junctures and path dependency. It convincingly dispelled whatever doubts may have existed about the potentially decisive effect historical events and turning points could have on key political outcomes, from political regimes to democracy to party systems. The lasting effect of Collier’s contribution is evident in many ways. Collier inspired other researchers in the field of comparative politics (e.g.,
Kathleen Thelen
Kathleen Thelen is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. She is the Ford Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a permanent external member of the Max Planck Institute ...
,
Paul Pierson
Paul Pierson (born 1959) is an American professor of political science specializing in comparative politics and holder of the John Gross Endowed Chair of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. From 2007-2010 he served at UC ...
,
Deborah J. Yashar, and James Mahoney) to fine-tune and further develop the model presented in ''Shaping the Political Arena.'' Moreover, the applications that draw on Collier’s core ideas about critical junctures and path dependence go beyond political science to economics.
The second theoretical contribution of ''Shaping the Political Arena'' concerns Latin American politics. In this regard, ''Shaping the Political Arena'' showed how the way in which labor was incorporated into national political institutions had a major and enduring effect on the subsequent evolution of a country’s party system and political regimes. Counterintuitively, where the role of labor was greater and where it participated more, the resulting political regime was more stable. This argument was examined through an ambitious comparative historical analysis of eight countries over a period of five decades that relied on four paired comparisons. One of the most controversial pairings was Brazil and Chile; this pairing was questioned by many Latin Americanists and experts on labor in Latin America. In retrospect, however, this choice has been vindicated. Nowadays it has become commonplace to see Brazil and Chile as exemplifying a common trajectory with regard to political and economic development. In brief, ''Shaping the Political Arena'' makes a major theoretical contribution through its elaboration of a critical juncture and path dependency model and also stands as the most ambitious and systematic work on Latin America in the tradition of comparative-historical analysis.
Methodology
A second strand of Collier’s work focuses on methodology, an area in which Collier has focused attention of setting standards for rigorous
qualitative research
Qualitative research is a type of research that aims to gather and analyse non-numerical (descriptive) data in order to gain an understanding of individuals' social reality, including understanding their attitudes, beliefs, and motivation. This ...
, as well as multi-method work that combines qualitative and quantitative methods. Collier's key publications on methodology are the co-edited ''Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards'' (2004/2010) and ''The Oxford Handbook of Political Methodology'' (2008).
Concepts and typologies
One major contribution concerns the centrality of concepts in political science research and the methodological issues of concept formation and conceptual change. Extending the tradition of
Giovanni Sartori
Giovanni Sartori (; 13 May 1924 – 4 April 2017) was an Italian political scientist who specialized in the study of democracy, political parties and comparative politics.
Biography
Born in Florence in 1924, Sartori graduated in Political and So ...
, Collier makes distinctive, original contributions. In his widely cited "Democracy with Adjectives" (coauthored, ''World Politics'' 1997), Collier shows how the analysis of concepts can help bring order to research characterized by great conceptual innovation, but perhaps not surprisingly also conceptual disorder. In particular, he shows how the explicit disaggregation of this concept and attention to its internal structure clarifies alternative meanings, and thereby contributes incisively to producing and accumulating knowledge
Collier has also made an important contribution to political science by refocusing attention on typologies.
Collier shows that typologies, when used carefully and systematically, can help form the key concepts in substantive research and are also an essential tool for theorizing. Moreover, in various publications, Collier has shown how decisions regarding conceptualization affect measurement, and he has offered guidelines regarding such issues as the choice of indicators and decisions regarding levels of measurement (e.g., whether the concept is operationalized in dichotomous or graded terms). Together, Collier’s ideas add up to a forceful statement for seeing concept analysis as a central challenge in political science research and provide an indispensable guide regarding the methodological tools for tackling this challenge.
Causal inference and qualitative research
Another of Collier’s central contributions concerns qualitative tools for
causal inference. Here, central thrusts of Collier’s work have been to put ideas about process tracing on a far more secure footing, and more broadly to codify procedures for qualitative causal inference. This work, published in ''Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards'' (1st. ed. 2004, 2nd. ed. 2010, coedited with Henry Brady), and in articles in leading journals, challenges the conventional view that statistical tools are always more powerful for causal inference. Most pointedly, Collier makes a strong case that qualitative researchers actually have an advantage over their quantitative counterparts. This advantage derives from the focus on "causal-process observations" in qualitative analysis. These may be defined as pieces of data that provide information about context and mechanisms, and that offer distinctive leverage in making causal inferences. In this work, as in his work on concepts, Collier has been keenly concerned with exploring how qualitative research can be improved by drawing attention to the multiple challenges faced by qualitative researchers. But Collier has also stressed that both quantitative and qualitative researchers face daunting methodological challenges, and this, in turn, requires a more evenhanded assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of both quantitative and qualitative methods.
Another direction of Collier’s work, which springs from the recognition of the shared challenges faced by quantitative and qualitative researchers, has been the exploration of multi-method strategies. Collier’s efforts to move beyond traditional methodological boundaries can be seen most vividly in ''Rethinking Social Inquiry'' and also in ''The Oxford Handbook of Political Methodology'' (2008, co-edited with
Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier and
Henry E. Brady).
Major works
Books
*''Critical Junctures and Historical Legacies: Insights and Methods for Comparative Social Science'', co-edited with Gerardo L. Munck (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022).
*''Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards'', second and expanded edition, co-authored and edited with Henry E. Brady (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010)
*'' Statistical Models and Causal Inference: A Dialogue with the Social Sciences'', by David A. Freedman, edited by David Collier, Jasjeet S. Sekhon, and Philip B. Stark. (Cambridge, 2009).
*''Concepts and Method in Social Science: The Tradition of Giovanni Sartori'', edited with John Gerring (Routledge, 2009).
*''Oxford Handbook of Political Methodology'', edited with Janet Box-Steffensmeier and Henry E. Brady (Oxford University Press, 2008).
*''Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America'', co-authored with Ruth Berins Collier (Princeton University Press, 1991; reissued in 2002 by University of Notre Dame Press, with a Preface by Guillermo O’Donnell)
*''The New Authoritarianism in Latin America'', editor and co-author (Princeton University Press, 1979)
*''Barriadas y elites'' (Lima, 1978)
*''Squatters and Oligarchs: Authoritarian Rule and Policy Change in Peru'' (Johns Hopkins, 1976)
See also
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References
External links
Profile at University of California, Berkeley* Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder, "David Collier: Critical Junctures, Concepts and Methods," pp. 556-600, in ''Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics''. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 200
{{DEFAULTSORT:Collier, David
University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty
American political scientists
Latin Americanists
Living people
1942 births
Harvard College alumni
University of Chicago alumni