
Larry Martin Bartels and Arati Prabhakar
Photo by Ryan K. Morris for the National Science & Technology Medals Foundation
Professor Larry Martin Bartels, received the National Medal of Science “for thought leadership that promotes democracy around the world,” according to his award citation. “Larry Bartels’ study of democratic institutions and analyses of partisanship and voting behavior, economic inequality, and political accountability offer astute insights that have shaped attitudes and call on all of us to protect our sacred democratic principles.”
Bartels, Princeton’s Donald E. Stokes Professor in Public and International Affairs, Emeritus, and an emeritus professor of politics, was on the Princeton faculty from 1991 to 2011. On Jan. 1, 2012, he transferred to emeritus status and joined the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University.
Bartels was the founding director of Princeton’s Center for the Study of Democratic Politics( at the School of Public and International Affairs. The center supports empirical research into democratic political processes and institutions.
It is very rare for a social scientist like Bartels to win the National Medal of Science, noted Christopher Achen, Princeton’s Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences, Emeritus, and an emeritus professor of politics.
“Larry is widely regarded as the preeminent scholar of American representative democracy,” said Achen, who co-authored “Democracy for Realists” with Bartels in 2016. “He has an uncanny ability to use hard evidence to overturn cherished political pieties. A running theme in his work is that elites get their way far more than ordinary people do, even in democracies, but that neither liberals nor conservatives are typically right about how that happens or what to do about it. Thus, we have much hard thinking to do if we are to repair the many broken aspects of our contemporary politics.”
Bartels received his B.A. from Yale University in 1978 and his doctorate from the University of California-Berkeley in 1983.
Full Story By Liz Fuller-Wright, Office of Communications