London School of Economics
APSA-QMMR David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award, 2024.
The David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award Selection Committee, composed of Raúl Madrid (Chair), Gerardo Munck, and Ben Read, voted to confer the 2024 prize on Professor Tasha Fairfield of the London School of Economics. In a 2022 Cambridge University Press book and a number of articles and book chapters, Professor Fairfield and her co-author Andrew Charman of the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a formal approach to qualitative inference based on Bayesian theory. Contributors to QMMR’s Fall 2023 symposium on the book, Social Inquiry and Bayesian Inference: Rethinking Qualitative Research, praised it as a major landmark. It provides a rigorous methodology for weighing evidence from competing theories and offers guidance on a host of related issues, including case selection. It has the potential to have an important impact not just on qualitative methods but on quantitative methods as well. Indeed, in his nomination letter, Professor Andrew Eggers of the University of Chicago writes that he views the approach as “the correct way forward for thinking about how to synthesize evidence in any problem where we want to assess distinct explanations, including when the evidence consists of results from randomized control trials or other quantitative studies.” In recognition of the importance of her work, Professor Fairfield has frequently been invited to participate in edited volumes and deliver talks at universities both in Europe and the United States. In addition, her 2017 article in Political Analysis won the Sage Best Paper Award from the Qualitative and Multi-Method Section of the American Political Science Association.
Professor Fairfield has also made important institutional contributions to the study of qualitative methods, another criterion for this award. She has served as an Executive Committee Member and as Secretary/Treasurer of the Qualitative and Multi-Method Section of the American Political Science Association and she participated in APSA’s Qualitative Transparency Deliberations Working Group on Comparative Methods and Process Tracing. She has also convened a qualitative Bayesian reasoning network, and she has taught various courses and workshops at the Institute for Qualitative and Multi-method Research (IQMR) as well as at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.
LSE Excellence in Education Awards, 2023 and 2019. Nominated for LSE Student Union Awards: Outstanding Teacher, 2024; Inspirational Teaching, 2020; Sharing Subject Knowledge, 2020.
Economics and Politics Section Best Article Prize, Latin American Studies Association. 2019. “Redistribution under the Right in Latin America: Electoral Competition and Organized Actors in Policymaking,” with Candelaria Garay (Harvard). Comparative Political Studies 50(14)1871–1906, 2017.
Sage Best Paper Award, Qualitative and Multi-Method Research Section, American Political Science Association. 2017. “Explicit Bayesian Analysis for Process Tracing,” with A.E. Charman (UC Berkeley). Political Analysis 25(3)363-380, 2017.
Donna Lee Van Cott Award for best book on Latin American political institutions, Latin American Studies Association, 2016. Private Wealth and Public Revenue in Latin America: Business Power and Tax Politics (CUP)