Career Awards

JOHN GAUS AWARD

The John Gaus Award and Lectureship honors the recipient’s lifetime of exemplary scholarship in the joint tradition of political science and public administration and, more generally, recognizes and encourages scholarship in public administration.

Award Committee: Greg Lewis, Chair, Georgia State University; Ann Bowman, Texas A&M University; Jocelyn Johnston, American University

Recipient: James L. Perry, Indiana University

Citiation: The American Political Science Association (APSA) confers the 2017 John Gaus Award on Distinguished Professor Emeritus James L. Perry for a “lifetime of exemplary scholarship in the joint tradition of political science and public administration.”

Perry has held a variety of leadership positions during his three decades at Indiana University and his decade at the University of California, Irvine. He has been the editor-in-chief of Public Administration Review since 2011, and this top journal has seen a large increase in its impact factor under his leadership. He was also the founding editor of the Journal of Public Affairs Education (JPAE).

Perry is best known for his role in furthering the study of public service motivation (PSM). His articles “The Motivational Bases of Public Service” (with Lois Wise), “Public Service Motivation: An Assessment of Construct Reliability and Validity,” and “Antecedents of Public Service Motivation” have been cited over 4,000 times. His efforts to encourage scholars to examine PSM, improve its measurement, and test its validity in a variety of settings have helped inspire scholarly research in over a dozen countries. PSM and the role of altruism in public administration have become prominent foci of panels at the APSA Annual Meeting and the Public Management Research Conference, as well as the frequent subject of articles in public administration journals.

Perry has also accomplished pioneering work on public labor-management relations, administrative reform, public leadership, public-private differences and performance-related pay. His five most cited non-PSM articles (“An Empirical Commitment of Organizational Commitment and Organizational Effectiveness,” “Collaboration Processes: Inside the Black Box,” “The Public-Private Distinction in Organization Theory,” “Strategic Management in Public and Private Organizations,” and “Organizational Commitment: Individual and Organizational Influences”) have been cited 5,000 times.

He has won numerous prior awards, including the Dwight Waldo Award from the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), the Distinguished Research Award from ASPA and NASPAA, the Paul P. Van Riper Award for Excellence and Service from ASPA, and election as a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. He has won numerous awards for individual papers, and his coauthored book Civic Service: What Difference Does It Make? won the best book award from the Public and Nonprofit Division of the Academy of Management.

Perry is also known as a generous mentor to doctoral students and junior scholars and as a supportive and welcoming colleague.

HUBERT H. HUMPHREY AWARD

The Hubert H. Humphrey Award is awarded annually in recognition of notable public service by a political scientist.

Award Committee: Mary Katzenstein, Chair, Cornell University; Michael Lipsky, Demos; Kent Weaver, Georgetown University/Brookings Institution

Recipient: Lloyd Axworthy, University of Winnipeg

Citation: Lloyd Axworthy, a native of North Battleford, Saskatchewan, graduated from United College (now the University of Winnipeg), in 1961, and completed his PhD in political science at Princeton University in 1973.

After graduate school, Axworthy returned to the University of Winnipeg to teach and direct a new Institute of Urban Affairs. He spent 27 years in political life beginning in 1973, serving six years in the Manitoba Legislative Assembly and 21 in the federal House of Commons. He held several cabinet positions at the federal level, notably as Minister of Employment and Immigration, Minister of Transport, Minister of Human Resources Development, and Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1996 to 2000. As Minister of Foreign Affairs, he reoriented Canadian foreign policy toward a focus on human security. He played a leading role in developing and winning ratification of the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel land mines, as well as establishing the International Criminal Court and the protocol on child soldiers.

After leaving public office, Axworthy served as director of the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Colombia. He then returned to the University of Winnipeg, where he served as president for 10 years before stepping down in 2014. While heading the university, he devoted particular attention to making university education more accessible to low-income, Aboriginal, immigrant, and refugee students. He currently serves as chair of the World Refugee Council, which is seeking to develop innovative proposals to strengthen international cooperation in dealing with the global refugee crisis.

Lloyd Axworthy has made enormous contributions both to the world of public policy in Canada and in the global community, and as an academic leader. For these extraordinary accomplishments and leadership, he is an outstanding recipient of the Hubert H. Humphrey Award.

BENJAMIN E. LIPPINCOTT AWARD

The Benjamin E. Lippincott Award recognizes a work of exceptional quality by a living political theorist that is still considered significant after a time span of at least 15 years since the original date of publication.

Award Committee: Sarah Song, Chair, University of California, Berkeley; Corey Brettschneider, Brown University; Cecile Laborde, University College London

Recipient: Bernard Boxill, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Citiation: Bernard Boxill’s Blacks and Social Justice (Rowman & Littlefield, 1984) is an exceptional work of deep and careful reflection. Written at a time when there was little direct discussion of race within political theory and philosophy, Boxill’s book demonstrates the crucial importance of addressing questions of racial justice within mainstream political theory. It does so through extensive critical engagement with canonical authors in Western political thought as well as key figures in African American political thought, from Martin Delany and W.E.B. DuBois to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Harold Cruse. Compelling us to broaden the range of texts we treat as rich sources of political theory, he productively puts historical and contemporary authors into conversation to address a range of pressing questions about discrimination in the market, busing, affirmative action, and the role of self-respect and civil disobedience in the pursuit of racial equality. In discussing these authors and themes, Boxill develops and defends his own distinctive liberal theory of racial justice. The book remains an indispensable source on the major racial issues of our time and an enduring model for how to combine rigorous theoretical argument with clear-eyed analysis of real-world controversies.

DISTINGUISHED TEACHING AWARD

The APSA Distinguished Teaching Award honors the outstanding contribution to undergraduate and graduate teaching of political science at two- and four-year institutions. The contribution may span several years or an entire career, or it may be a single project of exceptional impact.

Award Committee: Nancy Kassop, Chair, SUNY New Paltz; Welling Hall, Earlham College; Ethan Hollander, Wabash College

Recipient: Michael Genovese, Loyola Marymount University

Citiation: It is with great pleasure that we announce the selection of Michael Genovese of Loyola Marymount University as the recipient of the APSA Distinguished Teaching Award for 2017. There were many worthy candidates for this award, but the committee members reached a unanimous decision that Genovese’s record of teaching and research was singular and striking in its level of excellence. We are not alone in recognizing Genovese’s extraordinary talents: he has won no fewer than 16 separate teaching awards from his university. Recognition by APSA at the “distinguished” level is a fitting cap to all of the awards that came before.

Genovese holds the Loyola Chair of Leadership, is the director of the Institute for Leadership Studies, and is president of the Global Policy Institute at Loyola Marymount University. His excellence as a teacher and scholar of the American presidency and leadership studies permeates beyond the classroom walls. He has expanded educational opportunities for his students by creating new academic programs, establishing student scholarships, creating two study abroad programs, and publishing two teaching workbooks. Thus, “teaching” for Genovese encompasses not only masterful and memorable classroom instruction, delivered with professional expertise, humor, humility, and a healthy dose of life’s lessons, but is an enterprise that is always ripe for new ways to engage with students. The committee was impressed with the enormous range of Genovese’s contributions to his students, his university, and his discipline. The nominating letter from his department colleagues described him as a “master teacher.” That is exactly what this award is intended to celebrate: we agree completely with Genovese’s colleagues that his hefty record of exemplary and inspired teaching, in all of its manifestations, merits prime APSA recognition.

JAMES MADISON AWARD

James Madison Award recognizes an American political scientist who has made a distinguished scholarly contribution to political science.

Award Committee: Susan Stokes, Chair, Yale University; Helen Ingram, University of Arizona; Frank Thomspon, Rutgers University

Recipient: Deborah Stone, Brandeis University

Citiation: Deborah Stone is a public intellectual as well as academic scholar. She has taught political science and public policy at MIT, Brandeis University, and Duke University. She is the author of many books and articles, including influential works such as The Samaritan’s Dilemma: Should Government Help Your Neighbor? and The Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision-Making. In these and other studies, she demonstrates that problem definition is a strategic representation of a situation in which symbols and hidden stories play a large part. Stone delves deeply into the concept of policy goals, revealing that behind every policy issue lurks a contest over conflicting though equally plausible conceptions of such abstract goals as equity, efficiency, security, and liberty. And, she has argued that political reasoning is reasoning by political metaphor and analogy. Throughout her work, her focus is on politics as it is practiced—whether in the United States or in her more recent work in Nepal. As she demonstrates, policymaking is a struggle over criteria for classification, the boundaries of categories, and the definition of ideals that guide the way people behave.

In her public writings as well as books and articles, she has proven herself to be an insightful social historian, recounting the ways in which the altruistic instincts have been eroded over the last 80 years. She has led the way to restoring emotion as an important part of politics and political analysis. While many emphasized self-interest, she stressed cooperation. When only a few thought that “care-giving” was an appropriate political science topic, she redefined care as a political issue and civic obligation. Her work reveals that politics and policymaking have a moral dimension, and that citizenship and the public sphere prosper when ordinary virtues like kindness and empathy are practiced.

CAREY MCWILLIAMS AWARD

The Carey McWilliams Award is given annually to honor a major journalistic contribution to our understanding of politics.

Award Committee: Johanna Dunaway, Chair, Texas A&M University; Matt Baum, Harvard Kennedy School; Claes De Vreese, University of Amsterdam

Recipient: Jake Tapper, CNN

Citiation: Elite partisan politics in the United States is increasingly contentious, highlighting the importance of critical journalism as well as the challenges that serious, dedicated journalists face. CNN chief Washington correspondent and anchor Jake Tapper has worked as a journalist in the Washington, DC area for more than 15 years. He joined CNN in 2013, and currently hosts The Lead with Jake Tapper, and CNN’s Sunday show, State of the Union.

Before joining CNN, Tapper was senior White house correspondent for ABC News. During his nearly 10-year stint at ABC, Tapper was central to ABC’s award-winning national and international political coverage. Before ABC he worked as Washington and national correspondent for Salon.com. His reporting has also appeared in prestigious outlets such as The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The LA Times, and The Weekly Standard.

Tapper is widely respected for the work he has done in Washington over the last 15 years, but most recently he attracted praise for his reporting during the 2016 presidential election. Tapper’s political expertise was central to CNN’s 2016 election coverage throughout the campaign season as well as on election night, and he moderated two Presidential Primary debates. His work during the 2016 election earned several journalism awards, including a 2017 Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism, The Los Angeles Press Club’s Presidents Award for Impact on Media, the Canadian Journalism Foundation’s Tribute to Exemplary Journalism, and the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Merriman Smite Award for Presidential Coverage, which he won on three separate occasions.

During the first several months of the Trump administration, Tapper has continued to rigorously cover national and presidential politics through tough and revealing interviews with top White House officials and other political elites.

In his commitment to tough but objective reporting on national politics, Tapper’s work continues to make an enormous contribution to the public’s understanding of presidential politics. His accomplishments are especially worthy of attention in a digital era characterized by partisan media, active audiences with ample outlets from which to choose, and politicians’ tendencies to demonize the press in response to unfavorable coverage.

CHARLES E. MERRIAM AWARD

The Charles E. Merriam Award is presented biennially to recognize a person whose published work and career represent a significant contribution to the art of government through the application of social science research.

Award Committee: Lisa Anderson, Chair, American University of Cairo; Donald Kinder, University of Michigan; Paul Quirk, University of British Columbia

Recipient: Bernard Grofman, University of California, Irvine

Citiation: The Charles E. Merriam Award for 2017 goes to Bernard Grofman, the Jack W. Peltason Chair of Democracy Studies at the University of California, Irvine, who richly deserved this recognition.

Grofman is an Americanist, a rational choice scholar—a past president of the Public Choice Society—a prolific author of innovative research, and, most importantly for our purposes, a specialist on electoral redistricting whose work has been cited in nearly a dozen US Supreme Court cases. Grofman is author or coauthor of dozens of books and hundreds of scholarly articles. His scholarship has been influential not only among his colleagues, however, but also, and for decades, in the broader public interest. His work has been cited by the US Supreme Court, as in the 1986 case, Thornburg v. Gingles, which noted his research on racial voting patterns, and deployed in several federal court amici briefs on partisan bias in post-2000 census redistricting. In 2015, he was appointed a special master to redraw Virginia’s congressional districts after the previous districts were deemed unconstitutionally gerrymandered. He has testified on behalf of states and private parties, including the NAACP, and in favor of both Democratic and Republican plans.

Grofman has consistently applied his scholarlship not only to improving the methods and findings of his research fields but to ensuring the institutional integrity and procedural fairness of American democracy. As he as recently put it, his work is “intended to provide clear and judicially manageable statistical underpinnings for . . . specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for a plan to be an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. . . . Stopping egregious gerrymandering is not a partisan issue. . . . Regardless of which political party gains, the loser is US democracy.”

Charles Merriam was noted both for his commitment to innovative political and social science scholarship and for his devotion to American democracy. As one who applies his rigorous scholarship for public benefit, Bernard Grofman is a most fitting recipient of the Merriam Award.

HANES WALTON AWARD

The Hanes Walton Award recognizes a political scientist whose lifetime of distinguished scholarship has made significant contributions to our understanding of racial and ethnic politics and illuminates the conditions under which diversity and intergroup tolerance thrive in democratic societies.

Recipient: Michael Dawson, University of Chicago

Citation: Michael C. Dawson is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Dawson received his doctorate degree from Harvard. He has directed numerous public opinion studies that focus on race and public opinion. His research interests include black political behavior and public opinion, political economy, and black political ideology. More recently, he has combined his quantitative work with work in political theory. His first two books, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics and Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies, won multiple awards. Recent books include Not in Our Lifetimes: The Future of Black Politics and Blacks In and Out of the Left. Recently, Dawson launched a nationwide, multi-university project to study the intersection of race and capitalism. Recent work from Dawson related to this project includes the 2016 articles in Public Culture (with Francis) and Critical Historical Studies. He is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago. Dawson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006.

Ultimately, the selection committee selected Michael for the range and lasting impact of his contributions. Indeed, the committee was unanimous in declaring that it is virtually impossible to do research in the field of race, ethnicity, and politics without engaging Michael Dawson’s scholarly legacy.

Book Awards

RALPH J. BUNCHE AWARD

The Ralph Bunche Award is given annually for the best scholarly work in political science that explores the phenomenon of ethnic and cultural pluralism.

Award Committee: Keith Banting, Chair, Queens University; Andrew Douglas, Morehouse College; Victoria Hattam, The New School

Recipient: Vaughn Rasberry, Stanford University

Citiation: Vaughn Rasberry’s Race and the Totalitarian Century is an ambitious, broadly interdisciplinary, and boldly original book that will change how many scholars think about race and global politics in the twentieth century. The book sets out to expose and foreground a rich body of midcentury black internationalist critique and to challenge conventional genealogies of totalitarian practice and ideology. Working explicitly from the vantage of colonial modernity, from primary accounts of desegregation and decolonization struggles, Rasberry makes a compelling case that the color line, rather than liberal democracy, provides the conditions for a proper critique of totalitarianism.

The book is not merely an exposition and celebration of black critique. Rasberry also shows how considerable pressure was bought to bear on black intellectuals to curtail their criticisms of US and Western foreign policy and to, in the US context, corral their political work within the domain of domestic civil rights struggles. Also compelling is the way in which Rasberry’s research and argument move beyond familiar categories of domestic and foreign. Rasberry thinks not just transnationally, as we might invoke that term, but globally. Focusing on a wide range of historical events—from the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 to the Suez Crisis and Hungarian Revolt of 1956 to the Arab-Israeli War of 1967—Rasberry shows how international alliances established around the color line allowed for, or generated, capacities for anti-totalitarian struggle and imaginative visions of a nonaligned postwar order.

Race and the Totalitarian Century will speak quite directly to several subfields within the discipline. The book will be of interest to political theorists who have been engaging black politics directly for some time, though rarely in the historical and conceptual analysis of totalitarianism. Americanists and scholars of international relations will also find Rasberry’s reframing of the domestic and foreign both challenging and invigorating. And in its emphasis on black cultural production and the political contributions of black writers—figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, Shirley Graham, William Gardner Smith, Ollie Harrington, and John A. Williams—the book will encourage a rethinking of the scope and evidentiary bases of the study of race and politics.

GLADYS M. KAMMERER AWARD

The Gladys M. Kammerer Award is given annually for the best book published during the previous calendar year in the field of US national policy.

Award Committee: Janet Martin, Chair, Bowdoin College; Stephen Amberg, University of Texas, San Antonio; Traci Burch, Northwestern University

Recipients: Gary J. Miller, Washington University in St. Louis, and Andrew B. Whitford, University of Georgia

Citiation: In an era when partisan polarization and policy gridlock are either a dependent or independent variable across a wide range of studies, the authors advance our understanding of the making of public policy in looking “above politics” in their book Above Politics: Bureaucratic Discretion and Credible Commitment. While the bureaucracy is the focus of their study, the context needed to understand that bureaucracy and national policy making takes their scholarship on a journey through time, looking at fundamental political institutions, especially since the Progressive era.

With a powerful conceptual framework, and in writing accessible to a broad audience, the authors identify the bureaucracy as “an understudied and misunderstood player” (p. ix ) in the “operation of modern states and markets” (p. ix). While executives, legislatures, and courts are the “primary institutions of modern advanced industrial democracies,” (p. viii) it is the professionals, with their expertise and an ethos of professionalism, that contribute to governments taking on increasingly complex problems of governance, especially when policy can’t be resolved through the intended system of a separation of powers and checks and balances.

Miller and Whitford embrace the work of a number of scholars in the fields and subfields of public administration, game theory, international security, and economics. They also turn to the familiar writings of James Madison in The Federalist Papers. Their case studies and illustrations are diverse and far reaching in looking at national policy, including military base closings, nuclear deterrence, the National Labor Relations Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Dodd-Frank.

Their argument can be subtle at times, but in essence it is that political leaders need the bureaucracy for all the decisions a Congress and president can’t or won’t make. Elected officials let the bureaucracy act independently by building certain features into regulatory institutions (e.g., fixed terms, bipartisanship, and autonomy). But the key element to intended bureaucratic discretion or delegation is a “credible commitment” to professionalism. Elected officials also are in need of “a stability that comes from expertise itself” (p. 236).

While their study does much in addressing the problems of partisan gridlock of the past few decades, perhaps their study is most prescient in analyzing the role of bureaucracy as an antidote to the vagaries of a unilateral presidency in a time of unified government. Miller and Whitford provide a measured and tempered analysis of elected officials in a policy process envisioned over two hundred years ago, and of the professionals who have been delegated credible responsibility for policy due to their norms of professionalism; they are a key set of actors in determining and monitoring national policy.

The main focus of the authors is in looking “above politics” at the contributions of bureaucracies to economic stability and development, especially given problems inherent in a separation of powers system. Their cogent analysis of the economic collapse of 2008, with its roots in policy decisions of administrations and Congresses under control of both Democrats and Republicans, and the pitfalls that can arise in a delegation of responsibility to professionals, clearly answers a question posed by the authors in the conclusion: yes, the disciplines of political science and public administration can offer expertise, insight, and new research questions and designs which will enhance an understanding of regulatory mechanisms in economic research and perhaps facilitate the work of policy practitioners, both elected and unelected.

VICTORIA SCHUCK AWARD

The Victoria Schuck Award is given annually for the best book published on women and politics.

Award Committee: Christina Ewig, University of Minnesota; Amy Alexander, University of Gothenberg; Zoe Oxley, Union College

Recipients: J. Kevin Corder, Western Michigan University, and Christina Wolbrecht, University of Notre Dame

Citation: Did the granting of suffrage to women in the United States impact US politics? The answers to this question have been wide-ranging—from claims that women’s votes made no difference because they voted just like men, to claims that early women voters tipped the scales toward one party or another in the immediate post-suffrage era. But with no sex-segregated voting results and no sophisticated exit polls, claims about the effect on politics of the entry of women into the US voting population have been just that, only claims. Until now. Counting Women’s Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal by J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht utilizes new quantitative methods to question old assumptions. The book is path-breaking in its use of novel methods to develop an empirical basis to re-examine a period in US history that is much talked about, but for which we have little concrete evidence. The findings are crucial, as well, in that the authors provide a nuanced picture of the behavior of early women voters that defies easy conclusions. Like much of the best works in the women and politics literature, we learn that there are no essentialist answers.

Perhaps the biggest contribution of this book is the major hole it fills in our knowledge of the political behavior of early US women voters. Using aggregate voter returns and census data as their empirical base, the authors employ a Bayesian approach to ecological inference to estimate women’s voter turn out and vote choice in 10 US states. This novel methodological approach to overcome data deficits allows insights that we have not previously had. In Counting Women’s Ballots, for the first time, we have a clearer picture of the effects of women’s suffrage on US politics grounded in empirical data.

The findings are fascinating and complex. Contradicting the “women’s suffrage as failure” conventional wisdom (which emerged near the time of granting suffrage, and most certainly was also tainted by the sexist biases of the time), Corder and Wolbrecht demonstrate the important impacts early women’s voting behavior had on US politics. However, they provide no sweeping generalizations. Women’s turn-out rates and vote choice varied substantially depending on context. In many instances, they find that the starkest contrasts are not how women’s voting behavior compares to men in a single state, but rather how women’s voting behavior compares to that of women in other states—for example how women voters in Virginia behaved radically differently from women voters in Illinois. Differences in voter restrictions from North to South and in the dominant party in a given state matter more for women’s voting behavior than their sex. Moreover, at several turns, Corder and Wolbrecht find that surges or declines in voter turn-out that had been previously attributed to women’s entry (or lack thereof) into the voting pool, should instead be attributed to men’s voting behavior—a reminder that that the “male standard” is not always a stable measure. We also learn a great deal in this book about the politics of the four elections following suffrage.

More broadly, this work should encourage other researchers to reassess old arguments and conclusions. As new social scientific methods emerge, and as our understandings of the world become more complex, more social scientists should feel inspired by Counting Women’s Ballots to tackle old questions with new methods, and shed light not just by addressing data limitations but also by challenging conclusions that may be tainted by the social biases of the era in which they were conceived.

THEODORE J. LOWI AWARD

The Theodore J. Lowi Award recognizes the best first book in any field of political science, showing promise of having a substantive impact on the overall discipline, regardless of method, specific focus of inquiry or approach to subject.

Award Committee: Graham Wilson, Chair, Boston University; Shirin Rai, University of Warwick; Mauro Calise, Federica Weblearning

Recipient: Dara Kay Cohen, Harvard Kennedy School

Citiation: In her book Rape During Civil War, Dara Kay Cohen addresses a difficult, challenging, and important topic with exemplary academic skills and care. While wars between states have fortunately become rarer, civil wars have multiplied. Large-scale rape often becomes a weapon of war. Cohen uses a range of approaches and methodologies to understand why mass rape does and does not occur during civil wars. She uses both quantitative analysis and qualitative evidence. Given the traumatic nature of rape, it is deeply impressive that she has been able to obtain so many and such revealing interviews with victims and perpetrators, showing an ethic of research that is sensitive to the needs of her respondents.

Cohen’s work is also exemplary in defining and exploring a clear thesis. She shows that rape in civil war is to be understood not as the result of simple lust or of a clear strategy for terrorizing a population but as means by which loyalty and cohesion can be built up in military units composed of soldiers of disparate backgrounds who have been forcefully recruited. Participation in the horror of a gang rape forges that bond between soldiers that has long been regarded as essential for a fighting force to have adequate cohesion. Cohen therefore proposes and defends a novel and convincing explanation for the occurrence of a heinous practice. In doing so, Cohen presents a model of how to conduct research that is multimethod and committed yet rigorous on a deeply troubling subject. By bringing together a bold theoretical vision and a challenging topic with relevant political implications, Cohen’s work is an excellent tribute to Theodore J. Lowi’s legacy for political science.

WOODROW WILSON FOUNDATION AWARD

The Woodrow Wilson Award is given annually for the best book on government, politics, or international affairs. The award, formerly supported by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, is sponsored by Princeton University.

Award Committee: Edward Weber, Chair, Oregon State University; Benjamin Smith, University of Florida; Mariah Zeisberg, University of Michigan

Recipient: Eric Schickler, University of California, Berkeley

Citiation: Political scientists have long been fascinated with explanations for partisan realignment within US politics. A particular episode of realignment involves the emergence and adoption of major civil rights legislation, which most accounts render as having occurred in the 1960s as a belated addition to the Democratic Party’s agenda. This political transformation, typically presented as elite-driven, shattered the Democratic Party coalition between southern conservatives and their more liberal northeastern colleagues, eventually bolstering the conservative ranks of the GOP as southern Democrats migrated over to the GOP.

This year’s Woodrow Wilson Prize winner, Eric Schickler, however, provides a compelling and richly detailed case in Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965 that “[l]ong before Goldwater and LBJ made their own distinctive policy statements in the 1960s, their parties had been remade underneath them,” and not by party elites. Schickler employs multiple methods, including historical analysis, and rich archival data to demonstrate convincingly that the mid-1960s civil rights transition was the product of changes starting in the mid-1930s. It was then that a new constituency base—urban blacks as a key voting block for northern liberals—and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) started pressuring Democrats to understand that racial divisions undermined class consciousness. In short, one cannot understand the civil rights realignment in the 1960s without understanding its historical roots in federalism, local urban politics, and the decentralized election of House members, all of which were essential to the eventual, gradual incorporation of civil rights into the national Democrat Party. Put differently, Schickler helps us to understand the potential power of more localized social movements as key to major political and policy change in US politics.

Just as important as the challenge to the conventional wisdom of elite-driven change, Racial Realignment reminds social science scholars once again that there is much to be gained by placing a “premium on a methods approach that integrates historical and behavioral evidence and draws on diverse data sources for evidence,” and conducting analyses across institutions and levels of government. This is because, as Schickler demonstrates, major political change like this happens at the “intersection of multiple institutions and political processes,” not just a single institution or at the behest of a few powerful political interests within a short time frame. The evidence in Racial Realignment also alerts us that we should be wary of using actual policy decisions/outcomes as the main basis for understanding when change occurs because the reality is likely to be that decades of behind the scenes action are critical to understanding change.

Dissertation Awards

GABRIEL ALMOND AWARD

The Gabriel A. Almond Award is given annually for the best dissertation in the field of comparative politics.

Award Committee: Kimuli Kasara, Chair, Columbia University; Daniel Ziblatt, Harvard University; Michael Ross, University of California, Los Angeles

Recipient: Jeremy Ferwerda, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Citiation: Jeremy Ferwerda (PhD, Massechusetts Institute of Technology) is the winner of this year’s Gabriel A. Almond Prize for the best dissertation in the field of comparative politics. His dissertation was “The Politics of Proximity: Local Redistribution in Developed Democracies.” Ferwerda begins with the observation that European local governments’ discretion over redistributive policy has grown over the past 30 years. Ferwerda discovers that surprisingly decentralized discretion over policy has not led to a “race to the bottom” in social spending as it is commonly argued. Instead, newly empowered local governments exert greater redistributive effort, often raising their own revenue to do so.

Ferwerda develops an important argument to make sense of this new finding: local and national redistributive politics differ because of voters’ proximity to politicians and each other. He identifies two channels through which the “politics of proximity” affects redistributive spending. First, voters feel local negative externalities associated with poverty more keenly than national ones. Second, because local electorates are relatively small, politicians can swing elections by using redistributive policy to mobilize voters, particularly poor ones. Ferwerda provides impressive and original evidence for his theory using carefully constructed subnational tests with data from Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Belgium, and Sweden.

Some of the core findings of Ferwerda’s important dissertation include evidence that support for redistribution, especially amongst the wealthy, is greater in smaller municipalities. He also shows that local governments increase redistributive spending in response to visible disorder and if they raise their own revenue. Additionally, he finds that local politicians who spend on social services and transfers perform better at the ballot box. Finally, he demonstrates that local redistributive spending mobilizes poor voters, as turnout is higher in local elections than national ones in poor municipalities with discretion over social spending. In sum, while the Almond Award Committee had to choose among some very impressive dissertations, we have selected Ferwerda’s dissertation for its richly theorized and novel empirical findings on a substantively important topic, conducted in a highly empirically rigorous manner, which all together represent a significant contribution to the field of comparative politics and beyond.

WILLIAM ANDERSON AWARD

The William Anderson Award is given annually for the best dissertation in the general field of federalism or intergovernmental relations and state and local politics.

Award Committee: Nicole Bolleyer, Chair, University of Exeter; Michael Hall, Morehead State University; Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz, University of Rhode Island

Recipient: Bai Linh Hoang, University of Michigan

Citation: In “Democratic Listening? Race and Representation in Local Politics,” the author makes a novel contribution to the study of local government, representation, inequality, and racial discrimination. The author investigates an important and highly salient question: How much do local elected officials actually listen to members of their community when constituents take the extraordinary step of coming and testifying before the city council and what role does race play in this process? Democratic institutions are built on the idea that elected officials will consider the viewpoints of their constituents when making their decisions, yet very few studies investigate if constituents receive equal respect across subgroups in the literal sense. The author of this dissertation uses a novel and highly convincing qualitative methods approach that is well suited to studying this important theme. The author video-recorded local officials at public meetings and coded if they were actively engaged or distracted during each given piece of testimony, complemented by follow up interviews. The findings have important implications for the study of democratic governance and political participation: The author finds that white legislators are more likely to be distracted when black constituents speak than when white constituents do. This dissertation offers important and novel findings regarding the persistence of racial discrimination in the democratic process.

EDWARD S. CORWIN AWARD

The Edward S. Corwin Award is given annually for the best dissertation in the field of public law.

Award Committee: Jeff Staton, Chair, Emory University; Lori Johnson, Mercer University; Jeff Lax, Columbia University

Recipient: Allison Harris, University of Chicago

Citiation: Allison Harris of the University of Michigan, now at Princeton University, offers three essays on the political processes of judicial appointments as well as the consequences of who sits on the bench in “Who’s on the Bench?: Political Implications of Judicial Characteristics and Judicial Selection Methods in the US.” Harris tackles questions at the heart of work on the connections between democratic representation and the rule of law, especially as those concerns manifest in the political system of the United States. Refreshingly, she does so by considering salient issues across all levels of the American judiciary. At the federal level, Harris asks what kinds of Article III nominees are targeted for opposition by interest groups. She finds that qualifications matter for ideologically moderate judges but that for ideologically extreme judges, qualifications do not play a role. At the state level, Harris asks whether retention elections fully insulate judges from democratic accountability. If not, how much control over the judiciary can voters exert in such systems? In a study of judicial retention voting in Iowa following the Iowa Supreme Court’s Varnum v. Brien decision, Harris finds that the Court’s decision was a powerful cause of the defeat of sitting justices. Turning to the local level, Harris considers how the racial composition of courts influences sentencing. In a study of criminal sentencing on the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, Harris finds that increases in the number of judges who are not white decreases the likelihood of incarceration for defendants in felony cases.

Each of these questions presents challenging questions of inference. Harris presents a combination of rigorous and recently developed designs for causal inference and more traditional methods of analysis. The result is a flexible yet highly credible empirical record, whose claims are presented and defended carefully. The care Harris takes with interpreting her findings clarifies a number of open questions for further analysis. By tackling these questions across all levels of the American judiciary, and in the way that she does, Harris reminds us of that the combination of flexibility and rigor offers scholars an efficient way to powerfully address general and related theoretical questions central to the study of law and politics.

HAROLD D. LASSWELL AWARD

The Harold D. Lasswell Award is given annually for the best dissertation in the field of public policy.

Award Committee: Jeronimo Cortina, Chair, University of Houston; Christine Rothmayr Allison, University of Montreal; Lisa Miller, Rutgers University

Recipient: Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Harvard University

Citation: Alexander Hertel-Fernandez is the recipient of the 2017 Harold D. Lasswell best dissertation prize in the field of public policy co-sponsored by APSA and the Policy Studies Organization. Hertel-Fernandez developed a theoretically and empirically rich paradigm by which we can understand many puzzling policy outcomes in the American States. In his dissertation, “Whose Bills? Corporate Interests and Conservative Mobilization Across the US States, 1973–2013,” he presented an illuminating way emphasizing the role that states’ weak policy capacities allow businesses to advance their interests. His work sheds light on the quintessential and multifaceted interaction between politics and policy, which is a welcome contribution in today’s highly polarized political context.

MERZE TATE AWARD

The Merze Tate Award (formerly the Helen Dwight Reid Award) is given annually for the best dissertation successfully defended during the previous two years in the field of international relations, law, and politics.

Award Committee: Jessica Chen Weiss, Chair, Cornell University; Terry Chapman, University of Texas, Austin; Victoria Tin-bor Hui, University of Notre Dame

Recipient: Rochelle Terman, University of California, Berkeley

Citiation: Rochelle Terman’s dissertation—“Backlash: Defiance, Human Rights and the Politics of Shame”—investigates why and when human rights “naming and shaming” produces backlash rather than improvement. It develops an innovative theory of international defiance, rooted in the domestic political incentives of elites to provoke and manipulate shaming for strategic purposes. Empirically, it disaggregates pressure from the international community in three important ways. First, it investigates the role of social ties between the shamer and the target of human rights criticism; second, it examines the credibility of international human rights reporting and identifies disproportionate US news coverage of discrimination against women in Muslim-majority and Middle Eastern countries; and third, it draws out the counterproductive effects of stigmatizing pressure, which censures the actor rather than a particular behavior. The thesis draws upon quantitative and computational text analysis as well as an in-depth case study of the 2010–2011 global shaming campaign against Iran over the sentencing of a woman to stoning for adultery. It advances our understanding of how context as well as content matters for transnational advocacy and the spread of international norms concerning women’s rights.

E.E. SCHATTSCHNEIDER AWARD

The E.E. Schattschneider Award is given annually for the best doctoral dissertation completed and accepted during that year or the previous year in the field of American government.

Award Committee: Gisela Sin, Chair, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Julia Azari, Marquette University; Matthew Beckmann, University of California, Irvine

Recipient: Mallory SoRelle, Cornell University

Citation: We selected the dissertation titled “Democracy Declined: The Failed Politics of Consumer Credit” as the winner of the Schattschneider award for various reasons. First, this dissertation identifies a politically relevant puzzle that is familiar yet rarely considered in political terms. We were impressed because the author not only asks very interesting questions, theorizes about them, and links those questions to specific decisions, institutions and political behaviors, but also because he/she conducted an extraordinary data collection to test the hypotheses.

Why have policymakers consistently pursued disclosure requirements as the main form of consumer credit protection, even when indicators suggest they do not work? Why are consumers inactive when it comes to policies that affect them so deeply? Why have consumer interest groups struggled to mobilize borrowers toward political action? Why did Congress choose to distribute rulemaking and enforcement authority across agencies that were created to safeguard financial institutions instead of agencies that focus on individual consumers? How has the centralization of regulatory authority in the CFPB, an agency designed to protect consumers, reshaped these dynamics?

The author argues that throughout history, policymakers have faced a series of tradeoffs in their treatment of consumer credit. In every instance policymakers adopted measures that prioritize access to credit over consumer protection, and the financial security of lending institutions over the financial security of individuals. The author provides ample historical and contemporary evidence from a variety of sources like archives (e.g., presidential archives, consumer movements archives), legislative analyses, congressional hearings, and public opinion data. Across the board, we found this dissertation both innovative and surprising—and, best of all, convincing.

LEO STRAUSS AWARD

The Leo Strauss Award is given annually for the best dissertation in the field of political philosophy.

Award Committee: Judith Grant, Chair, Ohio University; Arash Abizadeh, McGill University; Deborah Baumgold, University of Oregon

Recipient: Kevin Duong, Cornell University

Citation: Kevin Duong has written an important work about how French writers and intellectuals in several key periods of state building represented violence as a moment of reconstitution of the social bond: “Democratic Terror: Redemptive Violence and the Formation of Nineteenth Century France.” Duong closely examines four historical cases in which social disintegration threatened the nation: the regicide of Louis XVI, early French colonization of Algeria, the Paris Commune, and the pre-World War I years. In his compelling and highly readable work, Duong shows how, in each case, rather than turning to law or democratic theory, polemicists instead made claims about how violence by the people could restore the cohesion of the French social body. Duong’s scholarship investigates what was gained in the move away from democratic theory, and how this concept of regenerative violence could be used to take aim at repairing the moral foundations of “the social.” In an innovative twist, Duong argues that French thinkers “did not repudiate violence as anti-social or pre-political, but instead, “reached for it in the form of democratic terror.” It was, he argues, in effect, the creation of a “weaponized image of violence”—an image that was introduced to great effect in the political culture of nineteenth century France. The work is a path-breaking reinterpretation of several key moments in French history and causes us to rethink long held assumptions about the historical uses of democratic theory and law as well as casting the historical uses of violence in a very new and different light.

LEONARD D. WHITE AWARD

The Leonard D. White prize is awarded annually for the best dissertation successfully defended during the previous two years in the field of public administration.

Award Committee: Zachary Oberfield, Chair, Haverford College; Mary Feeney, Arizona State University; Holly Goerdel, University of Kansas

Recipient: Alan Zarychta, University of Colorado at Boulder

Citation: We are delighted to present the 2017 Leonard D. White Award to Alan Zarychta for his dissertation, “It Takes More Than a Village: Governance and Public Services in Developing Countries.” In his dissertation, Zarychta analyzes data from two developing nations—Honduras and India—to understand the causes and consequences of public policy decentralization. Focusing on health centers and maternity care, the manuscript asks why developing nations decentralize public policy, why such moves succeed or fail, and how decentralization might impact citizens’ civic behavior. In answering these questions, Zarychta creates a valuable piece of interdisciplinary, multimethod research: the literature review knits together important scholarship from political science, public administration, and policy studies; the fieldwork and data collection are impressive; and the analytic framework is robust and well executed. In sum, the dissertation makes important theoretical contributions about the relationship between politics, policy, and administration as well as nuanced policy recommendations for administrators and policymakers in developing nations. The dissertation was written while Zarychta was a graduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder; his dissertation committee was chaired by Krister Andersson. We congratulate Zarychta on a job well done.

Paper and Article Awards

FRANKLIN L. BURDETTE/PI SIGMA ALPHA AWARD

The Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award is given annually for the best paper presented at the previous year’s annual meeting. The award is supported by Pi Sigma Alpha.

Award Committee: Jennifer Wolak, Chair, University of Colorado, Boulder; Carsten Jensen, Aarhus University; John Wilkerson, University of Washington

Recipient: Kenneth F. Greene, University of Texas at Austin

Citiation: We are pleased to announce “Why Vote Buying Fails: Campaign Effects and the Elusive Swing Voter” by Kenneth F. Greene of the University of Texas at Austin as our selection as this year’s winner.

In the paper, Greene challenges the conventional wisdom about the power of vote buying and clientelism in Latin American politics, arguing that modern campaigns undercut the utility of vote-buying. When candidates run legitimate democratic campaigns, it makes voters less predictable to vote-buyers, and increases the risks that vote buying will be ineffective. Greene explores whether campaign issues or vote-selling dominates among those who change their mind over the course of the campaign, and finds that vote-buying is far less effective than previously thought. This is good news for democracy.

The committee was impressed by the paper’s methodological sophistication and how the author uses survey experiments to deliver new insights about a topic of enduring interest among those who study elections in emerging democracies. The paper is well argued and the methods are well deployed. We believe this paper is well deserving of the distinction of being this year’s winner of the Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award.

Heinz Eulau Award: AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW

The Heinz Eulau Award is given annually for the best article published in the American Political Science Review in the past calendar year. The award is supported by Cambridge University Press.

Award Committee: Florence Faucher, Chair, Sciences Po; Johannes Lindvall, Lund University; Elizabeth Markovits, Mount Holyoke College

Recipient: Alisha C. Holland, Harvard University

Citiation: Alisha C. Holland makes a substantial contribution to comparative politics in her rigorous conceptual article, “Forbearance.” She describes forbearance as the voluntary and revocable non-enforcement of legislation, which is often quickly associated with state weakness (and the incapacity of the state to enforce the law). This hides a diversity of situations, but she argues that it is important to identify the intent of politicians and the implications of their decision not to enforce in order to assess when such a choice amounts to a covert distributive policy. This especially applies to contexts where weak welfare provisions bear heavy consequences on the poor, contributing to their resorting to violating the law. The article is original in that it brings together a theoretical argument with a solid empirical demonstration, based on extensive primary research. The work was truly exceptional in that regard. The demonstration is rich and complex but nevertheless presented in a clear and elegant manner. The demonstration draws primarily from Latin American qualitative research, but its applicability goes far beyond the area she focuses on, across all the subfields of political science. The article offers a significant contribution to the political science literature by demonstrating the crucial role of comparative analysis supported by thorough conceptual work and a detailed contextual analysis.

HEINZ EULAU AWARD: PERSPECTIVES ON POLITICS

The Heinz Eulau Award is given annually for the best article published in Perspectives on Politics in the past calendar year. The award is supported by Cambridge University Press.

Award Committee: Florence Faucher, Chair, Sciences Po; Ed Mansfield, University of Pennsylvania; Leslie Schwindt-Bayer, Rice University

Recipient: Matthew A. Kocher and Nuno P. Monteiro, Yale University

Citiation: In “Lines of Demarcation: Causation, Design-Based Inference, and Historical Research” (vol. 14, issue 4), the authors, Matthew A. Kocher and Nuno P. Monteiro, make a strong argument for methodological pluralism in political science through a tightly argued demonstration of the dependence of an design-based inference approaches on the qualitative, idiographic historical work that necessarily underpins construction of its data as well as validates the hypothesis and the selection of its cases. The article is deeply original in that it builds from the epistemological debates on degrees of scientificity to elaborate a precise, meticulous, and rigorous argument using re-analysis of a natural experiment on the effect of devolving powers to local elites on resistance to foreign occupation. The authors use qualitative and quantitative historical evidence to show that the causal inference alleged by the original study is invalidated when one considers that the “causes that produce the data operates trans-locally, associations on political, economic, or social variables that are measurable on the disaggregated units may entirely miss the truly underlying causes of the outcome under study.” Whilst the object of enquiry is methodological and epistemological, the article speaks to all sections of the discipline and its conclusions of the article are significant for all political scientists seriously concerned with the validity and plausibility of their research.

ROBERT A. DAHL AWARD

The Robert A. Dahl Award recognizes an untenured scholar who has produced scholarship of the highest quality on the subject of democracy, including books, papers, and articles.

Award Committee: Claire Adida, Chair, University of California, San Diego; Staffan Lindberg, Gothenberg University; Thad Williamson, University of Richmond

Recipient: Candelaria Garay, Harvard Kennedy School

Citiation: In Social Policy Expansion in Latin America, Candelaria Garay sets out to explain a fundamental puzzle that has characterized Latin American politics since the 1980s: Why is it that, in the midst of political democratization and economic liberalism, some Latin American countries have pursued expansionary and inclusive social policy programs while others chose a restrictive approach instead? The question is an important one for a region characterized by significant economic inequality and clientelistic politics: Why would political leaders ever choose to bring outsiders back in, undermining their own sources of clientelistic support?

Garay’s thorough analysis looks not only to explain the political dynamics that determine whether or not a particular administration embarks on inclusive and expansionary social policy reform, but also the dynamics and processes that characterize each social policy model. Garay challenges the conventional wisdom, namely that of the left turn in Latin America during that time period, to explain top-down social expansion as a result of electoral competition and bottom-up social expansion as driven by the threat of social mobilization. Finally, Garay explains the characteristics of social policy expansion—their scope, benefits level, and method of implementation—as a function of the policy negotiation process.

Empirically, Garay relies on an analysis of 21 administrations in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Chile from the 1980s to 2010. Garay combines qualitative and quantitative data analysis, drawing on extensive interviews, archival research, and new datasets measuring social outsiders, social program characteristics, and electoral dynamics. She performs both cross-country and within-country analyses, paying particular attention to the policy formation process. She presents a wealth of evidence to provide a compelling story about politics and policy making in Latin America.

Garay’s is a significant contribution to our understanding of social and political inequality, policy design and analysis, and the political foundations of exclusion and inclusion. The study’s scope is as deep as it is broad, and it sheds light on some of the most fundamental questions in our discipline. For these reasons, the committee awards Candelaria Garay the 2017 APSA Robert A. Dahl Award.