 |  |
It is with great pleasure that the Board of Directors of the Roper Center announces the winners of the 2013 Warren J. Mitofsky Award. They are Adam J. Berinsky, Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Eric Schickler, the Jeffrey and Ashley McDermott Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. The team is being honored for their extraordinary effort to shed new light on a substantial number of archived datasets at the Roper Center. Their contribution to multidisciplinary social science is significant and this project was dependent upon these valuable collections of data being maintained within the Roper Center archives.
Berinsky’s and Schickler’s joint scholarly work involves the study of the American mass public from the 1930s through the early 1950s. In order to study this era, the two have worked collaboratively to rehabilitate hundreds of older, under-utilized opinion polls, originally collected in those early decades and archived at the Roper Center. With support from the National Science Foundation, they are cleaning and recoding hundreds of surveys from that period, and the resulting datasets, which they have made available to the Roper Center for archiving and re-dissemination have permitted extensive data analyses by many other scholars in multiple disciplines. In addition, Berinsky and Schickler have developed a system of weights (among other technical refinements) that may be used in analysis of the reworked datasets. At the completion of the project, nearly one thousand surveys will have been reformatted, labeled and re-deposited with the Roper Center.
About the winners
Eric Schickler holds a B.A. from the New College of the University of South Florida and a master’s degree and PhD. from Yale University. He has received numerous prizes for his work on American politics, including the Richard F. Fenno Jr. Prize in 2002 for his book on Legislative politics — “Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress;” and in 2007 he won the Fenno prize again for his book, “Filibuster, Obstruction and Lawmaking in the U.S.”.
His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Legislative Studies Quarterly and Studies in American Political Development, among others.
Adam Berinsky graduated a Phi Beta Kappa from Wesleyan University, with a B.A. in Government and received a PhD. in Political Science from the University of Michigan. He is a specialist in the fields of political behavior and public opinion. He is the author of “In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion from WWII to Iraq” and “Silent Voices: Public Opinion and Political Participation in America.”
He has won several scholarly awards, has published articles in many academic journals and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
The Mitofsky Awards Committee—consisting of Nancy Belden, Mickey Blum, Skip Lupia, Dan Merkle, Lee Miringoff, and Susan Pinkus (Chair) and the Roper Center Board congratulated Adam Berinsky and Eric Schickler, this year’s recipients of the Warren J. Mitofsky Award for their excellent work using public opinion data.
A reception honoring Adam Berinsky and Eric Schickler was hosted by the Roper Center Board of Directors on November 7, 2013 at the Bryant Park Grill in New York City.
The Award was established as a tribute to Warren Mitofsky who was chairman of the Roper Center Board of Directors. The Center established a fund in his name to support the Roper Center and sponsor an annual award for outstanding work utilizing the Center’s archival holdings. Please consider contributing to this fund, the Andrew Kohut Student Fellowship Fund, or the Roper Center General Fund to help ensure the continuation of the important work of the Roper Center into the future. Your generosity is appreciated.