The William H. Riker Prize will be awarded to political scientist Gary W. Cox on Friday, April 2, at the University of Rochester. Cox will discuss Riker’s influence on his work in legislative and electoral politics at 2:30 p.m. in the Welles-Brown Room of Rush Rhees Library. The lecture is free and open to the public.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cox is professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California at San Diego. He has received numerous awards for his writing and research, including grants from the National Science Foundation.
The Riker Prize was established in 2000 in memory of William H. Riker, a political scientist who served on the faculty of the Department of Political Science at the University of Rochester from 1962 until his death in 1993. Riker believed that the scientific study of politics depended on combining excellent empirical analysis with incisive and well-developed deductive theory. Through his scholarship and leadership in the field, Riker and his colleagues established the department at Rochester as one of the leading centers of political science in the nation.
A researcher on formal theories of politics and other topics, Cox is the author of Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World’s Electoral Systems (1997), and The Efficient Secret: The Cabinet and the Development of Political Parties in Victorian England (1987), and the co-author of Elbridge Gerry’s Salamander: The Electoral Consequences of the Reapportionment Revolution (2002), and Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House (1993). His 1993 book won the Richard F. Fenno, Jr., Prize given by the American Political Science Association in honor of Fenno, who is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Rochester.
Cox received his bachelor of science degree in history and his doctoral degree in social science from the California Institute of Technology.
A reception will precede the lecture at 2 p.m. Previous winners of the Riker Prize are Robert H. Bates, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University, and Norman J. Schofield, William Taussig Professor of Political Economy at Washington University in St. Louis. For more information, contact (585) 275-4291.