William A. Gamson

William Anthony Gamson (born January 27, 1934) is a professor of Sociology at Boston College, where he is also the co-director of the Media Research and Action Project (MRAP).^[1] He is the author of numerous books and articles on political discourse, the mass-media and social movements from as early as the 1960s. His works include The Strategy of Social Protest,^[2] WHAT'S NEWS (1984),^[3] and Talking Politics (2002),^[4] as well as numerous editions of SimSoc.^[5]

Gamson, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1959, was the 85th president of the American Sociological Association in 1994.^[6] He is also a 1978 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.^[7] In 1962, he won the AAAS Prize for Behavioral Science Research.^[8]

Gamson's Law

Gamson's Law of Proportionality or simply Gamson's Law was suggested by Eric C. Browne and Mark N. Franklin in 1971.^[9] They demonstrated that there is proportionality between the numerical representation of each political force in a government and their number of seats in the parliament.^[10] It was based on the idea that each actor in government expects a payoff proportional to the weight that it contributes to the coalition, that had been proposed in the paper A theory of coalition formation, published in 1961 by William Gamson.^[11]

Selected bibliography

• Gamson, William A.; Modigliani, Andre (January 1987). "The changing culture of affirmative action". Research in Political Sociology 3: 137–177. 
• Gamson, William A.; Modigliani, Andre (1994), "The changing culture of affirmative action", in Burstein, Paul, Equal employment opportunity: labor market discrimination and public policy, New York: Aldine de Gruyter, pp. 373–394, ISBN 9780202304755.  Preview.

References

External links

• Web page at Boston College
• Gamson at Research Action Project