Kaase Receives Dinerman Award
The following is the citation presented to Professor Kaase during the award banquet held as part of the WAPOR 69th annual conference held in Austin, Texas.
WAPOR is pleased to present the 2016 Helen Dinerman Award to Max Kaase. As Peter Farago, the Director of the Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences noted, Max Kaase is “a well-known scholar of high academic prestige in the world of empirical social science and survey methodology.” Rory Fitzgerald, head of the European Social Survey, has observed that Kaase’s “scholarly contributions to comparative politics, political sociology, survey methods, and science policy have been truly exceptional.” Kaase has been a principal investigator in a series of cross-national studies including the Political Action Project (Samuel H. Barnes and Max Kaase et al., Political Action: Mass Participation in Five Western Democracies (1979)), the Comparative National Election Project, the Beliefs in Government project (Kaase and Kenneth Newton, Beliefs in Government (1995)), and the European Social Survey (ESS). As co-founder of the ESS with Roger Jowell (a previous WAPOR Dinerman Award winner), Kaase set new standards in comparative survey research marking a scientific breakthrough in survey methodology and collaboration. The ESS has recently recognized Kaase’s contribution by establishing the Jowell-Kaase Early Career Researcher Prize.
Kaase has also been an important institutional leader. Among a lifetime of distinguished leadership roles, he served as first executive director of the Center for Survey Research and Methodology (1974-1979) which merged with other institutes to form the GESIS-Leibniz – Institute for the Social Sciences, vice-president of the European Science Foundation, and president of the International Political Science Association.
His specific theoretical, substantive, and methodological contributions include expanding the investigation of political behavior to cover “conventional and unconventional political participation,” developing indicators to measure democracy, investigating the micro-macro puzzle of “aggregate stability and disaggregate instability,” studying the political transformation in post-Communist Europe, and advancing the use of contextual data and multi-level research designs to study political behavior.
For these and other contributions, the World Association for Public Opinion Research presents Max Kaase its highest award, the WAPOR Helen Dinerman Award which honors particularly significant contributions to survey research methodology.
Committee:
Alejandro Moreno (Chair)
Thomas Petersen
Tom W. Smith