This is an announcement of a new summer program of interest to advanced graduate students and junior faculty in political science. Please bring it to the attention of anyone who might be interested. Thank you.

The National Science Foundation's Political Science Program is supporting four annual four-week summer institutes, to be held from 2002-2005 at Harvard, Michigan, Duke, and UCBerkeley, respectively. Each of these institutes will accommodate up to 25 advanced graduate students and junior faculty. Funding is available to defray the cost of participants' travel, accommodation, and subsistence. Programs will be selective. Admission will be based significantly on the quality and potential of research presented. A team of up to 15 research faculty will conduct each institute. Training offered will include teaching and research components, providing students a high degree of individualized interaction with a far wider and deeper array of mentors than is available at any individual institution. The first institute will take place at Harvard from June 24 - July 19, 2002.

The Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models (EITM) focus of the Political Science Program at the NSF recognizes that gaps have appeared between theory and empirical method, and that these gaps impair scientific progress. The scientific study of politics requires empirical evaluation of theoretical models, but theories are often produced without adequate empirical exploration and empirical work too frequently adopts sketchy and oversimplified theory. To ameliorate this we need to train a new generation of scholars who can better link theoretical and empirical work, by offering younger scholars an opportunity to learn by seeing and doing in conjunction with older scholars who have been leaders in advancing theoretical and empirical work, focusing on substantive areas where appreciable research integrating theory and methods already exists.

Areas of instruction will be drawn from among spatial models, institutional analysis, macro- and international political economy, bargaining and coalitions, and international security. Formal models will include game theory, differential equation dynamic models, simple decision theory, and more complicated behavioral decision-making models. The empirical toolkit will encompass not only statistical inference but also focused analytically-based case studies, experimental methods, and computational models.

Lead participants from the four sites, in the order they will host the institutes, are James Alt, Harvard University; Rob Franzese, University of Michigan; John Aldrich, Duke University; and Henry E. Brady, UC Berkeley. All will be involved in the 2002 program.

An information session will be held at the Midwest meetings in Chicago in April. Further information on this first session and on the program will be posted on this website.

Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences
34 Kirkland St. Cambridge, MA 02138
phone: (617) 496-2450 fax: (617) 496-5149
cboffice@latte.harvard.edu

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