Prof. Dr. Tim Büthe was awarded the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award from the Qualitative and Multi-Method Research Section of American Political Science Association (APSA) at the APSA's 2017 Annual Meeting in San Francisco, jointly with Prof. Dr. Alan Jacobs.

The award is presented annually to a mid-career political scientist "to recognize distinction in methodological publications, innovative applications of qualitative and multi-method approaches in substantive research, and institutional contributions to this area of methodology." It honors the diverse contributions of David Collier, for decades one of the leading political scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and a founder of the APSA section for qualitative and multi-method research and the annual QMMR institute. As noted by Peter Hall, Professor of Government at Harvard University and QMMR Section President, this is "one of the most important awards the section can give, named after its founder, and the committee was unanimous in its regard for the many ways in which you have advanced the study and use of sophisticated methods in political science."

The selection committee's citation for the award highlighted among Tim Büthe's publications in particular his 2002 "Taking Temporality Seriously", the lead article in the American Political Science Review vol.96 no.3, and his 2011 Princeton University Press book The New Global Rulers: The Privatization of Regulation in the World Economy, co-authored with Walter Mattli, as well as Büthe and Jacobs' contributions as co-editors of Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, "the flagship publication of the Section – to which they have brought insight, verve and striking editorial skill. The quality of this publication has been outstanding. They have also made a remarkable contribution to the discipline as Co-Chairs of the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations, a mammoth enterprise involving dozens of scholars designed to identify the issues that efforts to render research reports more transparent raise for scholars using multiple kinds of qualitative methods. … There could be no more deserving recipients of this award."

Büthe and Jacobs were selected as the co-winners of the 2017 award by a selection committee, elected by the QMMR Section members in 2016 and composed of John Gerring (Boston University), Peter A. Hall (Harvard), James Mahoney (Northwestern) and Elizabeth Wood (Yale), based on nominations by APSA President Kathleen Thelen (MIT), Orfeo Fioretos (Temple University), Walter Mattli (Oxford), Lisa Wedeen (University of Chicago), and Deborah Yashar (Princeton).