Nathaniel L BeckView profile
Professor
Nathaniel L. Beck is a Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the NYU Wilf Family Department of Politics and holds an appointment as an Associated Professor of Public Service at NYU Wagner. He joined NYU in 2003 after a 25-year tenure at UC San Diego. His research focuses on political methodology, statistical analysis in policy contexts, and time-series-cross-section (TSCS) data modeling. A key interest is exploring Bayesian methods and their application to political science problems. Beck holds a B.A. from the University of Rochester (1967), and an M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Yale University (1969, 1972, 1977). His work bridges quantitative methods and substantive political questions, emphasizing research design and the interpretation of statistical findings. He teaches courses such as Politics 315 (Controversies in Public Policy) and advanced quantitative methods at the Ph.D. level. His research interests include political economy, fixed effects models, and the integration of Bayesian and classical statistical approaches. Recent work focuses on modeling TSCS data, particularly addressing challenges with binary dependent variables and multiway clustering. Beck has authored numerous publications on statistical methods in political science and co-edited the International Encyclopedia of Political Science . His replication data is publicly available on Harvard Dataverse.
