The Promise and Perils of Polling
Michael Alvarez's research focuses on public opinion and voting behavior, election technology and administration, electoral politics, political campaigns, and statistical and computational modeling. He has long been interested in empirically testing formal models of elections and voting behavior.
Alvarez is the co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project. He is a fellow of the Society for Political Methodology and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been recognized for his mentoring work, both at Caltech by the Graduate Student Council (twice) and by the Society for Political Methodology. He also received the Emerging Scholar Award in the Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior Section of the American Political Science Association in 2001.
Alvarez has a BA from Carleton College and a MA and PhD from Duke University.
Andrew Sinclair's research focuses on American politics, with a particular emphasis on political reform. He is a coauthor, along with Michael Alvarez, of Nonpartisan Primary Election Reform: Mitigating Mischief (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Recent work has continued to examine electoral reforms and political behavior, including a paper co-authored with Betsy
Sinclair: "Primaries and Populism: Voter Efficacy, Champions, and Election Rules" (Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, 2(3) 2021: 365-388). In addition, he has continued to examine the democratic aspects of reform in public administration, co-authoring with Maya Love and María Gutiérrez-Vera "Federalism, Defunding the Police, and Democratic Values: A Functional Accountability Framework for Analyzing Police Reform Proposals" (Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 51(3) 2021: 484-511).
A graduate of Claremont McKenna College's class of 2008, before returning CMC as a member of the faculty, Sinclair earned his Ph.D. at Caltech and was clinical assistant professor at NYU's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.