David Collier (political scientist)

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).

The "David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award," of the APSA Organized Section for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, was named after Collier in 2010.[11]

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).

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, 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).

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.

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, 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'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, 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, Paul Pierson, 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.

In The New Authoritarianism in Latin America (1979), Collier and several leading scholars in the field, such as Guillermo O'Donnell, Albert O. Hirschman, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, explore alternative explanations for the rise of authoritarianism in Latin America 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). 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 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.

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, 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).

After receiving his PhD, Collier taught at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he was promoted from Assistant to Associate Professor in 1975.[1] He joined the Political Science Department at Berkeley in 1978.[2] 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 Award.[3]

David Collier (born February 17, 1942) is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He is Chancellor's Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He works in the fields of comparative politics, Latin American politics, and methodology. His father was the anthropologist Donald Collier.

Collier was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1942. He has a B.A. from Harvard University in 1965, and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago in 1971.