We are proposing a new section on Bayesian Social Sciences at ISBA. If you agree that this section would be useful, please add your name to the petition!
Bayesian methods have become increasingly popular in many Social Sciences: there have been applications in fields as diverse as Anthropology, Archaeology, Demography, Economics, Geography, History, Linguistics, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology, among others. The appeal of the Bayesian framework may be philosophical, or may be practical, because of informative prior distributions, structured models which are well suited to Bayesian inference, or a strong need for uncertainty quantification.
Statisticians and practitioners have recently started meeting at workshops on Bayesian Methods for the Social Sciences. The 2022 edition in Paris and 2024 edition in Amsterdam gathered around 80 participants each; work has started to prepare the 2026 edition.
To help organize this community, and to strengthen links between statisticians and practitioners in the Social Sciences, we propose to start a new ISBA section on Bayesian Social Sciences. To create a new section, the ISBA bylaws require a petition signed by at least 30 ISBA members.
If you are interested, you can read the proposed bylaws and add your name to the petition. Please forward to colleagues who might find this relevant!
The proposed initial section officers are:
Monica Alexander
Nial Friel
Adrian Raftery
Robin Ryder
EJ Wagenmakers
