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). 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,WHAT'S NEWS (1984), and Talking Politics (2002), as well as numerous editions of SimSoc.

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

Gamson's Law of Proportionality or simply Gamson's Law was suggested by Eric C. Browne and Mark N. Franklin in 1971. They stated that there is proportionality between the numerical representation of each political force in a government and their number of seats in the parliament. 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.

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