Gary King is aptly named. He is in the political science department at Harvard University, but he is a statistician. Gary King is the Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. King and his colleagues develop and apply diverse empirical methods in multiple disciplines. He did his undergraduate work at SUNY New Paltz, and he got his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin. Gary King has written nine books, and he has published many scholarly articles. Gary King is a businessman as well. King co-founded the data analytics companies Crimson Hexagon, Learning Catalytics, and the educational technology companies Perusall and Open Scholar. Do you need data solutions?
Gary King Biography
Gary King was born on December 8, 1958. In 1980, He graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor degree in political science from the SUNY at New Paltz. In 1981, he earned a Master of Arts degree and in 1984 a Doctor of Philosophy degree in political science at the University of Wisconsin. His career in academia began in 1984, when he started as an assistant professor in the Department of Politics at New York University. He joined the faculty of Harvard’s Department of Government in 1987. He has also been a visiting fellow at Oxford University.
Gary King is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor and Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has been at Harvard for three decades. Gary King and his research group develop and apply empirical methods in many areas of social science, focusing on innovations that span the range from statistical theory to practical application.
Gary King was elected a Fellow in eight honorary societies and has won more than fifty-five prizes and awards for his work. He was elected President of the Society for Political Methodology and Vice President of the American Political Science Association. He has been a member of the Senior Editorial Board at Science, Visiting Fellow at Oxford, and Senior Science Adviser to the World Health Organization. He has written more than one hundred and ninety journal articles, thirty open-source software packages, and eight books.
Gary King proposed the now widely accepted standard for fairness in legislative redistricting known as “partisan symmetry,” and the methods used by courts and parties to detect when partisan gerrymandering violates it. His “ecological inference” methods for inferring individual behavior from aggregate data are used in most jurisdictions applying the Voting Rights Act to detect racial gerrymandering. His book with Keohane and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, helped launch the modern subfield of qualitative methods in political science; his book Unifying Political Methodology had a similar role for quantitative political methodology.
One of the most important current projects the King has is the Harvard Dataverse. He is very into sharing and reliability. That, by the way, is how academia works. Most academics are in favor of data sharing and applicability. It is amazing that even young graduate students can contact a noteworthy professor like King. Here is a link to the Dataverse.
Seminal Books and Articles
Some of Gary King’s seminal books include Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Methodology with Robert Keohane and Sidney Verba. Also, Unifying Political Methodology: The Likelihood Theory of Political Inquiry. King has written nine books, but these two are read by all graduate students around the world and are on many syllabi.
There are many articles that Gary King has written, usually with co-authors. The best one is on Multiple Imputation, that is, filling in missing data with a statistical method. There was a corresponding statistical program that went with this article. It was on Gary King’s website. The article won some awards an ISI Emerging Research Front Article, for authoring an article cited more often in the fields of Psychiatry and Psychology than any other, October 2002 (for Gary King, James Honaker, Anne Joseph, and Kenneth Scheve’s “Analyzing Incomplete Political Science Data: An Alternative Algorithm for Multiple Imputation,” American Political Science Review).
Conclusion
Gary King is a noteworthy professor at Harvard University. He might be one of the most noted political scientists in the world. He is a statistician and methodologist, not just a political scientist. His website lists twenty areas of research interest. All of his books and articles are not listed because doing that would be tedious.
