Award Recipient Archive

MPSA sponsors many awards for outstanding research presented at the annual conference and an award for the best article published in each volume of the American Journal of Political Science (AJPS). Nominations are made by conference chairs, discussants, and section heads after the conference and awards committees select the winning papers.

The following awards were given for research presented at the 2023 MPSA Annual Conference:

Flagship Awards

Pi Sigma Alpha Award
A $250 award for the best paper presented at the annual MPSA conference. Sponsored by Pi Sigma Alpha, the national political science honor society. Nomination pool will consist of papers selected for the field awards. Nomination pool will consist of papers selected for the field awards.

Culture, Capital and the Political Economy Gender Gap: Evidence from Meghalaya’s Matrilineal Tribes
Rachel Brulé, New York University Abu Dhabi
Nikhar Gaikwad, Columbia University (previously Princeton University)

Award Committee: Brandon Bartels, George Washington University (Chair); George Krause, University of Georgia; and Olena Nikolayenko, Fordham University

 

AJPS Best Article Award
A $1,000 award for the best article appearing in the volume of the American Journal of Political Science published in the year preceding the conference. All published articles in this timeframe will be considered.

Ethnic Networks
Jennifer M. Larson, New York University
Janet I. Lewis, US Naval Academy

Award Committee: Cara Wong, University of Illinois (Chair); Corwin Smidt, Michigan State University; and Richard Matland, Loyola University Chicago

Commendation from the Committee: Larson and Lewis’s “Ethnic Networks” is an excellent article that explores why diversity may affect collective action.  The authors combine a clever field experiment with fine-grained network data to study how information dissemination relates to network density and and ethnic diversity. Using a matched pair of villages in Uganda, they find that information spreads more broadly in the more homogeneous village, which is consistent with past research. However, they also find that networks are denser in the more heterogeneous village, contrary to expectations.  They then model why this greater density might still lead to less information diffusion, hinting that less trust may lead to slight delays in dissemination, and that these delays propagated through a network can aggregate into a substantively meaningful effect.  This is multi method work at its finest, and the committee unanimously concluded that this article deserved the award.

Field Awards

Best Paper in International Relations

A $250 award for the best paper on the topic of international relations.

Competition, Government Enforcement and Political Violence
Justin Conrad, University of North Carolina
William Spaniel, University of Rochester

Award Committee: Christopher Gelpi, Ohio State University-Main Campus (Chair); Ana Garriga, Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas (CIDE); and Pablo Pinto, University of Houston

Commendation from the committee:  Recent academic work on civil wars and intrastate violence has focused on the strategies and organization of insurgent groups. Within this line of research the theory of outbidding has taken the center stage. This theory suggests that in the presence of multiple groups challenging a government, insurgent groups are more likely to resort to violence behavior as a recruitment device. Being able to successfully conduct an attack is a credible signal of the group’s prowess vis-a-vis other insurgent groups. Increasing the number of challengers would thus result in more violence, as competition for recruits among violent groups becomes more intense. Yet the focus on violent groups and their audiences ignores the role of the incumbent government, which is interested in neutralizing the challenges from the violent groups. Conrad and Spaniely model the choice of insurgent groups of engaging in violent behavior, in the shadow of a government’s decision to invest in enforcement. The authors derive a novel prediction where the government’s ability to monitor the recruitment process results in lower violence even as the number of competing groups goes up. The empirical evidence is nicely tied to the theory, and shows that low marginal costs of enforcement significantly reduce the violence resulting from outbidding among insurgent groups. The theory and empirics offer new insights to academic debates on outbidding in intrastate conflict, and have important policy implications for understanding of the strategic determinants of political violence.

Kellogg/Notre Dame Award

A $250 award for the best paper in comparative politics.

Culture, Capital and the Political Economy Gender Gap: Evidence from Meghalaya’s Matrilineal Tribes
Rachel Brulé, New York University Abu Dhabi
Nikhar Gaikwad, Columbia University (previously Princeton University)
Award Committee: Michelle Dion, McMaster University (Chair); Kunle Patrick Owolabi, Villanova University; and Su-Mei Ooi, Butler University

Commendation from the Committee: : This paper examines a central question in the study of gender and politics: Why do women tend to prefer and support redistribution and welfare more than men? The authors highlight the difficulties in disentangling the causal effects of wealth and culture as explanations for the gap in preferences because in most of the world wealth and cultural values tend to reinforce men’s economic autonomy and women’s dependence. To address this research question and resolve this difficulty, the authors have designed a multifaceted study that takes advantage of variations in cultural traditions around wealth inheritance and management in the Indian state of Meghalaya. While political institutions and society in the state are largely patriarchal, cultural practices around wealth vary. Some families follow matrilineal wealth traditions, in which women own and inherit wealth (with co-management within households), while others follow patrilineal traditions that are more common throughout the world. The authors use various experiments and qualitative interviews and focus groups to demonstrate that the gender gap evaporates in matrilineal communities and to explain how men and women think about their support for government redistribution or charitable giving. The result is a thorough and innovative answer to a key question in comparative politics, and one which we expect to be widely cited and impactful across a range of subfields, from political economy to political behavior. We also think the study reflects the best type of comparative research, which is both locally situated but also aims to inform our understanding beyond the community or country of study. 

Kenneth J. Meier Award

A $250 award for the best paper in bureaucratic politics, public administration, or public policy.

Reproducible and Replicable: An Empirical Assessment of the Social Construction of Politically Relevant Target Groups
Rebecca J. Kreitzer, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Candis Watts Smith, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Award Committee: Amanda Rutherford, Indiana University-Bloomington (Chair); Christoffer Green-Pederson, Aarhus University; and Sanghee Park, Boise State University

Commendation from the Committee:  Kreitzer and Smith build on existing theory related to the social construction of target populations by empirically testing both the categorization of groups into advantaged, contender, dependent, and deviant types and how consistently target groups are constructed with a unique methodological design.  More specifically, the authors use M-Turk to crowd source the social construction of 73 target groups to place them more accurately along a deservingness-power matrix.  Calculating point estimates for these groups has clear implications for both the theoretical understanding of how social constructions are formed as well as practical applications in considering the target groups of public policies crafted by individuals of different partisan and ideological leanings.

 

Best Paper in American Politics

A $250 award for the best paper on the topic of American politics.

Voting Can Be Hard, Information Helps
Melody Crowder-Meyer, Davidson College
Shana Kushner Gadarian, Syracuse University
Jessica Trounstine, University of California, Merced

Award Committee: Shana Gadarian, Syracuse University (Chair – Recused); E. Scott Adler, University of Colorado; Ben Bishin, University of California, Riverside; and Eric J. Juenke, Michigan State University (De Facto)

Commendation from the Committee: This paper addresses a very important question that we don’t know much about, and the authors developed a nice set of experiments to gain leverage about how citizens decided and use cues to vote in non-partisan elections.  These types of elections are ubiquitous in American politics, but are dramatically understudied.  The results speak to questions not only about how people make decisions, but how various prejudices play out.  The paper is very thorough and addresses many of the initial concerns I had as I read though its very thoughtful design (e.g., demonstrating that the expected stereotypes from the literature and on which the hypotheses are based are reflected in the data).  Importantly, they also enhanced the validity by having the treatments copy the ballots actually used in real elections.  Moreover, they validated their results using observational data which is very rare in these kinds of studies. 

Best Paper in Political Behavior

A $250 award for the best paper on the topic of political behavior.

The Images in Our Heads: Race, Partisanship and Affective Polarization
Nicholas A. Valentino, University of Michigan
Kirill Zhirkov, University of Michigan

Award Committee: Hans Noel, Georgetown University (Chair); Hyeonho Hahm, University of Mannheim; and Laura Stoker, University of California, Berkeley

Commendation from the Committee: Valentino and Zhirkov build on the insightful work by Lilliana Mason that affective polarization is driven by the increasing alignment of voters’ social identities with the partisan identity. This paper argues that the main driver of this process is the racial component of both social and partisan identity. The paper offers multiple tests and pushes forward the increasingly important literature on affective polarization.

 

Evan Ringquist Award

A $250 award for the best paper on the topic of political institutions.

What is a productive Congress?
Michelle Whyman, Duke University

Award Committee: Justin Phillips, Columbia University (Chair); Michael Crespin, University of Oklahoma; and Beth Leech, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Commendation from the committee: Whyman careful employs the U.S. Code to construct three measures of congressional legislative productivity.  These measures are the number of provisions a Congress enacts, the proportion of enacted provisions that endure, and the number of provisions that Congress repeals.  These new measures not only provide a rich new data source for scholars, but they also challenge the idea that gridlock has increased in the modern Congress.  Indeed, Whyman shows that the durable legislative output of Congress remains high.

Review of Politics Award (co-winners)

A $250 award for the best paper in normative political theory.

Alcmaeon’s Islands: Motion and Rest in Thucydides
Borden Flanagan, American University

Commendation from the Committee: Borden Flanagan’s “Alcmaean’s  Island: Motion and Rest in Thucydides” is a model of a daring, bold, and enlightening interpretation of a classic text.  Noticing an odd story inserted for no obvious reason into Thucydides’ History, Prof. Flanagan takes the anomalous presence of the story as an invitation to follow it into reflections on the “the cosmological themes of motion and rest, and the gods” in Thucydides text.  He thereby adds great depth and weight to recent considerations of the philosophic underpinnings of Thucydides’’ History.

Gold Rush: Cinema, Credit, Calculation, Chance, and Choice
Char Roone Miller, George Mason University

Commendation from the Committee: Forthcoming

Award Committee: Michael P. Zuckert, University of Notre Dame (Chair); Michaele Ferguson, University of Colorado – Boulder; and Johnny Goldfinger, Marian University

 

Robert H. Durr Award

A $250 award for the best paper applying quantitative methods to a substantive problem.

The Effectiveness of Public and Private Signals: A Document-Based Approach
Azusa Katagiri, Stanford University
Eric Min, Stanford University

Award Committee: John B. Londregan, Princeton University (Chair); Fernando Daniel Hidalgo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Philip Edward Jones, University of Delaware

Commendation from the Committee: Katagiri and Min compare the impact of crisis bargaining conducted along private and public channels using state of the art text as data methods. The authors conduct a supervised analysis of Soviet resolve as reflected in digitized diplomatic cables, communiques and internal memorandum. Using the resulting measures the authors then deploy Negative Binomial and Autoregressive Poisson Event Count Models to demonstrate that during the Berlin crisis private communications impacted real time White House assessments of Soviet intentions, whereas public communiques did not. Their finding poses a significant challenge to the emphasis on audience costs and public signals in the literature.

Subfield Awards

Lucius Barker Award

A $250 award for the best paper on a topic investigating race or ethnicity and politics and honoring the spirit and work of Professor Barker.

The New Racial Realignment: Democratic Appeals to Latinos and White Support for the Democratic Party
Mara Cecilia Ostfeld, University of Michigan

Award Committee: Bernard L. Fraga, Indiana University (Chair); K. Juree Capers, Georgia State University; and Tyson D. King-Meadows, University of Maryland-Baltimore County

Commendation from the Committee: Prof. Ostfeld’s impressive study seeks to extend work on race and party alignment by examining how the Democratic Party’s appeals to Latino voters may depress White support for Democratic candidates. Using multiple survey experiments grounded in the 2012 and 2016 elections, Ostfeld demonstrates that support for Obama and Clinton decreased when White respondents learned that these candidates were making appeals to Latino voters. The paper thus has crucial implications for the future of American electoral politics, suggesting a crossroads may be coming for parties seeking to negotiate an increasingly diverse electorate. Ostfeld’s study makes an important and timely contribution to our understanding of political parties, campaigns, political psychology, and racial/ethnic politics.

Patrick J. Fett Award

A $250 award for the best paper on the scientific study of Congress and the presidency.

Legislative Staff and Representation in Congress
Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Columbia University
Matto Mildenberger, UC Santa Barbara
Leah Stokes, UC Santa Barbara
Award Committee: Brandice Canes-Wrone, Princeton University (Chair); Samuel Kernell, University of California-San Diego; and Craig Volden, University of Virginia

Commendation from the Committee: Congressional members are highly dependent on their staff for making policy decisions, yet we know little about the extent to which staffers have accurate perceptions of constituency preferences.  Hertel-Fernandez, Mildenberger, and Stokes offer an original survey of staffers in order to address this question. The survey not only offers direct observational evidence, but also two embedded experiments that consider interest group influence.  The results suggest that staffers systematically misestimate their constituents’ preferences in ways that favor powerful interest groups.  These findings cause us to reconsider the factors that influence democratic responsiveness.   

Sophonisba Breckinridge Award

A $250 award for the best paper on the topic of women and politics.

All Male Panels? Representation and Democratic Legitimacy
Amanda Clayton, Vanderbilt University
Diana O’Brien, Indiana University
Jennifer Piscopo, Occidental College
Award Committee: Christopher Karpowitz, Brigham Young University (Chair); Delysa Burnier, Ohio University-Main Campus; and Kathleen Dolan, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Commendation from the Committee: The authors of this well-written, theoretically rich, and empirically impressive paper take up an important issue – women’s descriptive representation – and examine it in a new light, asking whether women’s presence affects citizens’ impressions of the legitimacy of government processes and decisions.  To answer their research questions, the authors designed a creative and careful set of survey experiments, and they find that women’s presence profoundly affects citizens’ views of both the procedural fairness and the substantive decisions that emerge from political institutions. Their work moves the literature beyond our current understanding of the importance of women’s representation, which tends to focus on how women behave as actors, to show the conditions under which women’s presence affects the perceived legitimacy of democratic procedures and decisions. The paper is impressive not only for its theoretical and methodological creativity, but also for its clear connections to core concerns of democratic theory. The authors have thus opened a new frontier in scholarship on the connection between women’s descriptive representation and democratic legitimacy. For all these reasons, the committee is pleased to honor this groundbreaking work.

Career Stage Awards

Best Paper by an Emerging Scholar

A $250 award for the best paper, regardless of field or topic, by a scholar or scholars who has or have received the terminal degree(s) within six years of the year in which the paper was presented.

Fear, Institutionalized Racism, and Empathy: The Underlying Dimensions of Whites’ Racial Attitudes
Christopher D. DeSante, Indiana University
Candis Watts Smith, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Award Committee: Jacqueline Demeritt, University of North Texas (Chair); Suzanne M. Robbins, University of Florida; and Bilal Dabir Sekou, University of Hartford

Commendation from the Committee: This year’s Best Paper by an Emerging Scholar Award goes to Christopher DeSante and Candis Smith for their paper “Fear, Instuonalized Racism, and Empathy: The Underlying Dimensions of Whites’ Racial Atudes.” In their research, DeSante and Smith argue that racial atudes are muldimensional. They suggest that two dimensions underlie how Whites think about race in contemporary American polics. One is cognive: an awareness of systemic racial bias against non-Whites. The other is emoonal, depending on feelings towards racial minories. They validate the simultaneity of cognive beliefs and emoonal reacons with new and excing survey data. The selecon commiee was impressed by both the ambion and potenal impact of DeSante and Smith’s work, and look forward to seeing it published, cited, and engaged in the future.

Best Paper Delivered by a Graduate Student Award

A $250 award for best paper delivered by a graduate student.

Keeping Your Friends Close: A Study of Punishment and Intraparty Insurgency
Zachary McGee, University of Texas at Austin

Award Committee: Natasha Altema McNeely, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (Chair); Peter John Loewen, University of Toronto-Canada; and David Ryan Smith, Texas A & M University-Corpus Christi

Commendation from the Committee: McGee offers a  compelling and insightful paper on intraparty relationships, specifically how Intraparty Insurgency has led to a strengthening between members associated with the House Freedom Caucus and the impact of that upon the House Republican Party. The findings, if continuing into the future, could lead to a rethinking of the strength of parties and their impact upon the workings of the chambers in Congress. 

Best Undergraduate Paper Presented in a Poster Format

A $250 award for the best paper presented in a poster format by an undergraduate.

Foster Care Privatization: How an Increasingly Popular Public Policy Leads to Increased Levels of Abuse and Neglect
Mandi Eatough, Brigham Young University

Award Committee: Jeffrey S. Peake, Clemson University (Chair); Gayle Alberda, Fairfield University; Gregg B. Johnson, Valparaiso University; Lori Kumler, University of Mount Union; and Michael Makara, University of Central Missouri

Commendation from the Committee: Eatough’s paper represents high-quality policy analysis of a pressing issue that has not received the analytical attention it deserves.  Essentially, she asks: What are the policy outcomes, in terms of positive placements, neglect and abuse, for privatization of foster care placements among the states?  While this question has received some attention in qualitative accounts, very little quantitative research has sought to address it in a comprehensive manner.  Privatization in all manner of public policy delivery has grown in popularity over the last several decades, yet we have only limited systematic understanding of its impact on clients.  This is especially the case for vulnerable populations who often lack powerful advocacy on their behalf, such as children in foster care.
Using a massive data set of foster-care outcomes from across the states, covering a 14-year period, Eatough’s analysis suggests that privatization leads to systems emphasizing the costs of placement, and that positive and more costly outcomes (e.g., adoption or long-term placements) are significantly less common in privatized settings, whereas negative outcomes tend to be more common.  Her analysis of abuse and neglect shows clearly that greater privatization in a state’s foster care system leads to increased odds of physical abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect.  Finally, her analysis of privatization legislation across the states indicate a relationship between the time of enactment and shifts in incidence levels of abuse and neglect.  The committee was especially impressed with the quantitative analyses in the paper.  To test her hypotheses, Eatough effectively employed multinomial logit, proportional hazard models, and across-state time series analyses.  Her visualization of the data and results as also quite effective, making her findings easy to digest. 

Herbert Simon Award
A $500 award for a scholar who has made a significant contribution to the scientific study of bureaucracy. Submissions are handled by the Midwest Caucus on Policy Administration.

Charles S. Shipan
Award Committee: Midwest Caucus for Public Administration

Updated 5/14/20

The following awards were presented at the 2017 conference for research presented at the 2016 conference:

Best Paper by an Emerging Scholar

A $250 award for the best paper, regardless of field or topic, by a scholar or scholars who has or have received the terminal degree(s) within six years of the year in which the paper was presented.

Vigilante Mobilization and Local Order: Evidence from Mexico
Javier Osorio, City University of New York
Livia I. Schubiger, London School of Economics
Michael Weintraub, Binghamton University, SUNY

Award Committee: Suzanna Linn, Penn State University (Chair); Danny Hayes, George Washington University; David Stasavage, New York University

Committee Commendation: Javier Osorio, Livia Schubiger, and Michael Weintraub’s paper is one of the first efforts to use careful empirics to examine the phenomenon of local self-defense against criminals. In areas where the state fails to ensure a monopoly of violence, why do some local communities take matters into their own hands? The authors ask this question in the Mexican context using a novel measure of vigilante presence based on machine-coded news reports. They then show that vigilante presence today is correlated with a local legacy of violent collective action during the Cristero rebellion of the 1920s. This paper deserves to be widely read and cited.

Best Paper in International Relations

A $250 award for the best paper on the topic of international relations.

Rural Grievances, Landholding Inequality and Civil Conflict
Henry Roderick Thomson, University of Oxford

Award Committee: Vesna Danilovic, University at Buffalo (Chair); David Cunningham, University of Maryland; Karl Kalenthaler, University of Akron

Committee Commendation: In the times of rising socio-economic inequality, Henry Thomson’s paper makes a timely contribution to the discipline. Scholarship has made important strides in our understanding of the interconnection between inequality and domestic stability, yet it is still replete with unresolved analytical issues. This paper addresses one of the central research puzzles in this area: how to account for the mixed findings about economic inequality and domestic unrest when the societies that experience civil conflict are precisely those in which the rural economy predominates with significant disparities in land ownership. This in turn should reasonably be expected to be at the core of grievances leading to unrest. Thomson draws a fine conceptual distinction, resulting in his innovative measurement for economic inequality. He also offers a novel theoretical account for the apparent paradoxical nature of having both stability and instability in societies with a moderate to highly unequal distribution of land. The presented cross-national empirical analysis, which robustly validated his arguments, is equally impressive in its methodological proficiency and sophistication. The nominated papers were of high quality and the competition was strong, but it is the committee’s consensus that Henry Thomson’s exceptionally innovative paper on several levels—theoretical, conceptual, and empirical—makes a significant contribution to the studies of conflict and international relations, and is indeed the deserving recipient of the Award for the Best Paper in International Relations presented at the 2016 MPSA conference.

 

Best Paper Presented by a Graduate Student

A $250 award for best paper by delivered by a graduate student.

Can New Procedures Improve the Quality of Policing? The Case of ‘Stop, Question and Frisk’ in New York City
Jonathan Mummolo, Stanford University

Award Committee: Rene Rocha, The University of Iowa (Chair); Leslie Schwindt-Baer, Rice University; Martin Johnson, Louisiana State University

 

Committee Commendation: Most believe that racial discrimination in policing results from implicit and explicit biases as we as sociological forces, which are difficult to change with policy. But Mummolo—relying on both quantitative and qualitative methods—shows that small changes in policing practices can dramatically decease unjustified stops. This finding causes us to rethink the power of policy to shape social outcomes.

 

Best Paper Presented in a Poster Format

A $250 award for the best paper presented in a poster format.

Mobile Phone Ownership, Gender, and Political Participation in Africa
Matthew Bondy, College of William & Mary

Award Committee: Marisa Abrajano, University of California, San Diego (Chair); Jason Barabas, Stony Brook University; Jie Lu, American University

Committee Commendation: Bondy’s paper examines the effects of mobile phone ownership on political engagement. He conducts a RCT in Tanzania and analyzes observational data from the Afrobarometer survey and finds that mobile phone ownership is positively correlated with political participation.  The committee was impressed by both the theoretical and analytical contributions of the paper. 

Best Undergraduate Paper Presented in a Poster Format

A $250 award for the best paper presented in a poster format by an undergraduate.

The Effect of Nationality on Grass-root Volunteer and Donors Support for Nongovernmental Organizations
Laura Boyer, Brigham Young University

Award Committee: Christine Lipsmeyer, Texas A&M University (Chair); Chris Mann, Skidmore College; Eric Gonzalez Juenke, Michigan State University

Committee Commendation: In this ambitious and thoroughly executed paper, Boyer explores how local and foreign aid workers can influence grass-roots support and opinion of NGOs. Bringing together elite interviews and quantitative data, this novel paper tackles an under-explored issue—in-country volunteers’ support—from multiple angles, culminating in an impressive all-around paper.

Herbert A. Simon Award

A $500 award for a scholar who has made a significant contribution to the scientific study of bureaucracy. Submissions are handled by the Midwest Caucus on Policy Administration.

Andrew B. Whitford
Award Committee: Midwest Caucus for Public Administration

Kellogg/Notre Dame Award

A $250 award for the best paper in comparative politics.

Anti-Identities in Latin America: Chavismo, Fujimorismo, and Uribismo in Comparative Perspective
Jennifer Cyr, University of Arizona
Carlos Meléndez, Universidad Diego Portales

Award Committee: Sarah Brooks, The Ohio State University (Chair); Alex Tan, University of Canterbury; Zeynep Somer-Topcu, The University of Texas at Austin

Committee Commendation: This paper develops an original theory to explain important negative partisan political movements in developing, less stable political systems. While a considerable body of research has examined negative partisanship in recent years, the overwhelming focus of this literature has been on advanced industrial democracies. Cyr and Meléndez make an important contribution to research on political behavior and representation by showing how non-cohesive and unorganized anti-identities can develop against the dominant regime in developing countries.

Kenneth J. Meier Award

A $250 award for the best paper in bureaucratic politics, public administration, or public policy.

Slow-Rolling, Fast-Tracking, and the Pace of Bureaucratic Decisions in Rulemaking
Rachel Augustine Potter, University of Virginia

Award Committee: Vicky Wilkins, American University (Chair); Christopher Berry, University of Chicago; Valerie Martinez-Ebers, University of North Texas

Lucius Barker Award

A $250 award for the best paper on a topic investigating race or ethnicity and politics and honoring the spirit and work of Professor Barker.

Saved from a Second Slavery:  Black Voter Registration in Louisiana from Reconstruction to the Voting Rights Act
William Cubbison, George Washington University
Ismail White, George Washington University

Award Committee: Micheal Giles, Emory University (Chair); Lorrie Frasure-Yokley, University California, Los Angeles; Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, Purdue University

Committee Commendation: In a counter point to V.O Keys “racial threat” hypothesis, Cubbison and White make a unique theoretical contribution by arguing that an increase in percent black entails the possibility of an increase in black social capital and agency. They support their argument with an analysis of a unique historical data set of voter registration and school attendance by race in Louisiana.

Review of Politics Award (co-winners)

A $250 award for the best paper in normative political theory.

Reparative Justice and the Moral Limits of Discretionary Philanthropy
Chiara Cordelli, University of Chicago

Committee Commendation: The paper is an impressive piece of analytic work, with a bold and innovative normative argument. Cordelli argues that private philanthropy should not be understood as altruism, but as contributions to repair harms of present and past injustices.

Edmund Burke and the Deliberative Sublime
Rob Goodman, Columbia University

Committee Commendation: The paper is an impressive, historically learned, and beautifully written reading of Burke. Goodman argues that Burke developed a subtle understanding of the important relationship between constitutional machinery and deliberative judgment, both of which are necessary for polities to thrive. 

Award Committee: Mark Warren, University of British Columbia (Chair); Clarissa Rile Hayward, Washington University, St. Louis; Eileen Hunt Botting, University of Notre Dame

 

Robert H. Durr Award

A $250 award for the best paper applying quantitative methods to a substantive problem.

Of Rents and Rumors:  Government Competence and Media Freedom in Authoritarian Countries
Haifeng Huang, University of California, Merced
Yao-Yuan Yeh, University of California, Merced

Award Committee: Michael Alvarez, CalTech (Chair); Christina Wolbrecht, University of Notre Dame; David Siegel, Duke University

Committee Commendation: In their paper, Huang and Yeh build a theoretical model of an authoritarian state in which the ruler can prevent rebellion by allowing media freedom.  They build a dataset of authoritarian countries, from 1993 to 2014, and test the predictions of their theoretical model using a variety of approaches to assess the robustness of their theoretical claims.  Their paper is an excellent example of research that develops a useful theoretical model and tests it using quantitative data with multiple methods.  Their approach helps Huang and Yeh answer important substantive questions about why different authoritarian regimes allow for varying levels of media freedoms:   While a free media can be dangerous for an authoritarian regime, it also lets citizens learn when the regime is not responsible for problematic economic performance, thus lowering the chance that citizens incorrectly launch an insurrection against an otherwise economically competent authoritarian state.  

Sophonisba Breckinridge Award

A $250 award for the best paper on the topic of women and politics.

Making Space for Women: Explaining Citizen Support for Legislative Gender Quotas in Latin America
Tiffany D. Barnes, University of Kentucky
Abby Córdova, University of Kentucky

Award Committee: Mona Lena Krook, Rutgers University (Chair); Evelyn Simien, University of Connecticut; Sarah F. Anzia, UC Berkeley

 

 

Committee Commendation:

The paper theorizes and empirically analyzes citizen support for legislative gender quotas in Latin America. The authors argue that institutional performance and political values interact in gendered ways to explain differences in men’s and women’s support for quotas. Using data from 24 Latin American countries, they find that good governance increases men’s support, while preferences for increased government involvement determine patterns of women’s support.

The committee was impressed with the original theorizing and excellent research design reflected in this paper, which in turn constitutes a major advance in the gender and politics literature by connecting quality of governance, political values, and gender to levels of policy support. It also advances the rapidly expanding literature on gender quotas — which has primarily focused on candidates and political parties — by looking at how citizens respond to these policy reforms.

Pi Sigma Alpha Award

A $250 award for the best paper presented at the MPSA Annual National Conference. Sponsored by Pi Sigma Alpha, the national political science honor society.

Judicial Federalism and Representation
Jonathan P. Kastellec, Princeton University

Award Committee: Peter Enns, Cornell University (Chair); Irfan Nooruddin, Georgetown University; Lonna Atkeson, University of New Mexico

Committee Commendation:  “Judicial Federalism and Representation” develops a theory for how judicial federalism in the United States affects the relationship between public opinion and policy within the states. The theoretical model and rich empirical analysis offer important insights into the U.S. judicial system, state public opinion, representation, and prominent Supreme Court decisions.

AJPS Best Article Award

A $1,000 award for the best article appearing in the volume of the American Journal of Political Science published in the year preceding the conference.

Sources of Authoritarian Responsiveness: A Field Experiment in China
Jidong Chen, Beijing Normal University
Jennifer Pan, Stanford University
Yiqing Xu, University of California, San Diego

Award Committee: Adam Berinsky, MIT (Chair); Margit Tavits, Washington University, St. Louis; Vera Troeger, University of Warwick

Committee Commendation: Chen, Pan and Xu use a clever and rigorous research design to study one of the central questions in political science: responsiveness under authoritarianism. Focusing on China, they find that threats of collective action and threats of “tattling” to upper levels of government motivate officials to respond to their citizens. They collect novel and original data through an online field experiment among 2,103 Chinese counties which allows analyzing the factors that affect officials’ incentives to respond to citizens in an authoritarian context. The paper is extremely well written and accessible to a wide audience in political science, it is very well cited already and can and will inspire future research in this area.

The following awards were presented at the 2016 conference for research presented at the 2015 conference:

Best Paper by an Emerging Scholar

A $250 award for the best paper, regardless of field or topic, by a scholar or scholars who has or have received the terminal degree(s) within six years of the year in which the paper was presented.

Informed Preferences: the Impact of Unions on Worker’s Policy Views

Sung Eun Kim, Columbia University

Yotam Margalit, Tel Aviv University

Award Committee: Michael Berkman, The Pennsylvania State University (Chair); Eric McDaniel, University of Texas at Austin; Gabriel Sanchez, University of New Mexico

Committee Commendation: In this paper, Sung Eun Kim and Yotam Margalit offer a creative and compelling answer to an important and unresolved question in political socialization: Is the relationship between union membership and political behavior driven by self‐selection into labor organizations or exposure to the organizations’ political positions? Taking advantage of the different self‐selection mechanisms in states with and without right‐to‐work laws, original coding of issue positions in multiple labor unions, and a survey of American workers, the authors find that self‐selection into unions of workers with particular attitudes is important, but there is as well a strong and independent effect for union membership. This work advances our understanding of labor unions and political socialization more generally.

Best Paper in Comparative Policy Award

A $500 award sponsored by the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice (JCPA) and International Comparative Policy Analysis Forum for the best paper in comparative policy. The winner(s) may submit their paper to JCPA for an expedited triple blind-fold review process.

Mass Administrative Reorganization, Media Attention, and the Paradox of Information

Anthony M. Bertelli, New York University

J. Andrew Sinclair,  New York University

Award Committee: Charles Blake, James Madison University (Chair); Christoffer Green-Pedersen, Aarhus University; Klaus Schubert, University of Muenster

Committee Commendation: The bulk of the literature on comparative public policy focuses on the dynamics of agenda setting, policy formulation, and policy adoption. Policy termination receives considerably less examination. In this stimulating paper, Professors Bertelli and Sinclair combine insights from multiple literatures to analyze the reorganization and termination of independent public agencies in the United Kingdom during the first David Cameron government. […] Their work provides a model that can be used to study policy termination and agency reorganization in countries around the world. We congratulate the authors on this paper and look forward to their future research on this important and oft-neglected topic.

 

Best Paper in International Relations

A $250 award for the best paper on the topic of international relations.

Heeding to the Losers from Trade. Evidence from Legislators’ Trade Policy Preferences and Legislative Behavior

M. Victoria Murillo, Columbia University

Pablo Pinto, University of Houston

Award Committee: Tim Buthe, Duke University (Chair); Navin Bapat, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; S. Laurel Weldon, Purdue University

Committee Commendation: Trade policy preferences are a big topic in IPE, which has attracted prolific attention in recent years. Murillo and Pinto nonetheless manage to make a significant contribution to this literature through an analysis of trade policy preferences among Argentine legislators, using a combination of roll call voting analysis and survey experiments. This allows them to show that Argentinian legislators differ in their trade policy preferences at the individual level, even within the same party, and in particular that they differ in the responsiveness to various trade policy frames, in ways that are substantially attributable to the economic interests of the socio-economic consequences of trade for the local communities in which they live (rather than their electoral districts, suggesting a broader socio-economic logic of preference than “just” the electoral logic). This is an important and quite novel insight in a literature that, despite its size and explosive growth in recent year is still very short on analyses of policy preference formation by actual political elites, which recent research strongly suggests is quite distinct from mass trade policy preference formation among the mass public.

 

Best Paper Presented in a Poster Format

A $250 award for the best paper presented in a poster format.

A Portrait of Politics: The Wholesale Marketing of the Chicago Neighborhood of Pilsen

Scott Braam, University of Illinois, Chicago

Award Committee: Kyle Saunders, Colorado State University (Chair); Natalie Masuoka, Tufts University; Efrén Pérez, Vanderbilt University

Committee Commendation: The Braam poster/paper is an interesting exploration of Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood that analyzes changing art in the area over time as well as interviews conducted with local activists/artists. Scott develops a narrative about the tradeoffs of urban revitalization and its effects on political and social identity over time, also touching on timely topics of interest such as racial contact and neighborhood gentrification. The committee commends Scott and wish him much future success.

 

Best Undergraduate Poster Award

A $250 award for the best paper presented in a poster format by an undergraduate.

The Calculus of Vote-Selling: Electoral Trust and the Value of a Vote

Eli Rau, Yale University

Award Committee: Jessica Carew, Elon University (Chair); Anne Boxberger Flaherty, Merrimack College; Joely  Proudfit, California State University San Marcos

Committee Commendation: This paper builds a strong conceptual and theoretical foundation through a solid examination of the relevant extant literature. Rau explains and applies appropriate methodology for examining clientelism in Argentina, which leads to his insightful analysis regarding expected and unexpected results concerning how one’s trust in government influences decision-making regarding vote-selling.

Herbert A. Simon Award

A $500 award for a scholar who has made a significant contribution to the scientific study of bureaucracy. Submissions are handled by the Midwest Caucus on Policy Administration.

Mathew D. McCubbins

Award Committee: Midwest Caucus for Public Administration

Kellogg/Notre Dame Award (co-winners)

A $250 award for the best paper in comparative politics.

Clerics and Scriptures: Experimentally Disentangling the Influence of Religious Authority in Afghanistan

Luke N. Condra, University of Pittsburgh

Mohammad Isaqzadeh, American University of Afghanistan

Sera Linardi, University of Pittsburgh

Committee Commendation: The Condra, Isaqzadeh and Linardi paper addresses a fundamentally important question—what is the influence of religious authority on social and political mobilization? What motivates individuals more, the status of the “messenger” (i.e the religious authority) or the message itself?  Using a unique experimental design in Afghanistan, that examines monetary contributions after sermons, they find that while the presence of a cleric increases propensity to give, it also reduces the amount given.  On the other hand, the authority of scripture increases the amounts that subjects give while not affecting the propensity to give relative to the Cleric condition.  They contend that the cueing of the supernatural (regardless of the messenger) acts as a reminder for other motivations to give. Finally, their results demonstrate that religious authority has the greatest effect on those who feel relatively insecure socioeconomically. In general, their findings have very important implications for the role that religious authority plays in social and political mobilization, not only in Afghanistan, but beyond.

AND

Information acquisition, local media, and electoral Accountability: when do Mexican voters punish Incumbents for high homicide rates?

John Marshall, Harvard University

Award Committee: John Ishiyama, University of North Texas (Chair); Sarah Brooks, Ohio State University; Carol Mershon, University of Virginia

Committee Commendation: The Marshall paper is very detailed work that examines the impact of violence on voters’ assessments of incumbent politicians in Mexico. The paper demonstrates that salient short-term performance indicators—such as recent local homicides—revealed just before an election can be major determinant of voting in Mexico. This is because voters who have weak priors over a candidate will only acquire information around election time. Thus the level of violence just before an election, and the media coverage of such violence,  will decisively affect an incumbent’s electoral prospects. The paper is theoretically well developed and empirically very sophisticated. Marshall convincingly shows that violence and media coverage just prior to elections has a major impact on the electoral prospects of incumbents. The paper not only has implications for Mexican politics in the era of widespread drug war violence, but for elections in other conflict ridden countries as well.

 

Kenneth J. Meier Award

A $250 award for the best paper in bureaucratic politics, public administration, or public policy.

Politics or Performance in Regulatory Personnel Turnover

Kathleen M. Doherty, University of Southern California

David E. Lewis, Vanderbilt University

Scott Limbocker, Vanderbilt University

Award Committee: Patricia F. Freeland, University of Tennessee (Chair); Mary Guy, University of Colorado, Denver; Erin Melton, University of Connecticut, Hartford

Committee Commendation: This examination of the conditions under which turnover in federal regulatory positions is likely to occur illuminates the opaque junction of politics, management, and the regulatory process. Conclusions regarding the actions of key regulatory officials engaged in major rule-making contributes significantly to our understanding of the regulatory process.

 

Lucius Barker Award

A $250 award for the best paper on a topic investigating race or ethnicity and politics and honoring the spirit and work of Professor Barker.

Racial Resentment and Whites’ Gun Policy Preferences in Contemporary America

Alexandra Filindra, University of Illinois at Chicago

Noah Kaplan, University of Illinois at Chicago

Award Committee: Andra Gillespie, Emory  University (Chair); Andrew Aoki, Augsburg College; Karen Kaufmann, University of California, Los Angeles

Committee Commendation: In their paper, Drs. Filindra and Kaplan test the relationship between priming, racial resentment and support for gun control.  Using an experimental protocol and implicit attitude testing, they find that racially resentful whites who are exposed to implicit primes of black faces are more likely to oppose gun control.  This in and of itself is notable and timely.  However, Drs. Filindra and Kaplan supplement the experimental data with an excellent historical analysis about the origins of resistance to gun control measures and the connection between opposition to civil rights and opposition to gun control.  It was this methodological pluralism that made the paper stand out from its peers.  As one of the committee members described it, “this paper is running on all cylinders.”  For this, we congratulate Drs. Filindra and Kaplan and encourage everyone to read it in Political Behavior.

 

Patrick J. Fett Award

A $250 award for the best paper on the scientific study of Congress and the presidency.

Veto Rhetoric and Presidents’ Legislative Influence: Authorization Legislation, 1985-2008

Scott Guenther, University of California- San Diego

Samuel Kernell, University of California-San Diego

Award Committee: Lawrence Dodd, University of Florida (Chair); Jennifer Lawless, American University; Kenny Whitby, University of South Carolina

Committee Commendation: The Guenther and Kernell article addresses an important question that is paramount to an understanding of the relationship between Congress and the presidency. That is, do veto threats influence legislation? In this well written, carefully researched, and innovative paper, the authors challenge the conventional view that presidential veto threats have minimal effects on congressional decisionmaking. One of the many attractive features of their study is the utilization of a new measure of a presidential veto threat to pending legislation derived from the Office of Management and Budget. Their rigorous research design, methods, and sophisticated analysis of legislation over an extended period of time (1985-2008), convincingly demonstrates that presidential veto threats do matter. This paper has important implications for our understanding of lawmaking and will be a major contribution to the study of legislative-executive relations.

 

Pi Sigma Alpha Award

A $250 award for the best paper presented at the MPSA Annual National Conference. Sponsored by Pi Sigma Alpha, the national political science honor society.

The Company You Keep: How Voters Infer Party Positions on European Integration from Governing Coalition Arrangements

James Adams, UC Davis

Lawrence Ezrow, University of Essex

Christopher Wlezien, University of Texas at Austin

Award Committee: L. Sandy Maisel, Colby College (Chair); Tasha Philpot, University of Texas at Austin; Rogers Smith, University of Pennsylvania

Committee Commendation: The Adams, Ezrow, and Wlezian paper extends our understanding of voter perceptions and decisions by demonstrating that European voters use coalition-based heuristics to infer party positions, that is, that as a Prime Minister and his party shift positions, voters infer that junior coalition parties are shifting positions as well.  They further demonstrate that these coalition-based heuristic matter, as they prompt party sorting, and that voters employ these heuristics more effectively than more nuanced factors such as party manifestos or expert judgments. 

 

Review of Politics Award

A $250 award for the best paper in normative political theory.

Augustine, the Wise Man, and the Myth of Self-Sufficiency: Contextualizing City of God 19

Veronica Roberts, Princeton University

Award Committee: Lawrie Balfour, University of Virginia (Chair); Alexander Kirshner, Duke University; Melvin Rogers, University of California, Los Angeles

Committee Commendation: Roberts offers a compelling and novel interpretation of Augustine’s City of God. Focusing on Augustine’s treatment of the philosophical Wise Man, Roberts’ finely-honed essay considers how Augustine distinguished himself from his influences, including the Stoics, the Peripatetics, and the Platonists. Augustine, on Robert’s account, uses the image of the Wise Man to mark out the insufficiency of mere philosophy for sustaining virtue and happiness. Roberts expertly uses the past several decades’ scholarship on Augustine alongside very recent work in Roman philosophy to offer a richer picture of the philosophical world to which Augustine was responding and in terms of which his thought makes the most sense. Her analysis of the debate over the “philosopher’s wise man” vividly contextualizes Augustine’s otherwise deceptively sui generis-seeming thought and humanizes a writer whom we too often approach as simply a Great Book. And it yields a distinctively Christian conception of solidarity, forged in and through suffering that departs from the Stoic understanding of detachment as the basis of public service.

 

Robert H. Durr Award

A $250 award for the best paper applying quantitative methods to a substantive problem.

An Exploration of Multiple Systems Estimation for Empirical Research With Violent Deaths

Jule Krüger, University of Michigan and Human Rights Data Analysis Group –

Kristian Lum, Virginia Tech

Award Committee: D. Sunshine Hillygus, Duke University (Chair); Monique Lyle, University of South Carolina; John Transue, University of Illinois Springfield

Committee Commendation: Previous empirical research on political violence has been hindered by inaccurate death count statistics. Directly addressing this measurement challenge, Kruger and Lum offer a compelling validation of the multiple systems estimation approach to estimating violent deaths in Kosovo, with important implications for future human rights research and policy-making.

 

Sophonisba Breckinridge Award

A $250 award for the best paper on the topic of women and politics.

Complex Interactions:  Candidate Race, Sex, Electoral Institutions, and Voter Choice

Melody Crowder-Meyer, University of the South

Shana Kushner Gadarian, Syracuse University

Jessica Trounstine, University of California, Merced

Kau Vue, University of the California-Merced

Award Committee: Sherri Wallace, University of Louisville (Chair); Niambi Carter, Howard  University; Dara Z. Strolovitch, Princeton University

Committee Commendation: The committee has selected this research by Melody Crowder-Meyer, University of the South, Shana Kushner Gadarian, Syracuse University, and Jessica Trounstine, University of California, Merced for its direct confrontation with intersectionality in an attempt to complicate theories of electoral institutions by incorporating gender and race into an analysis of American elections.

 

Westview Press Award

A $250 award sponsored by Westview Press for best paper by delivered by a graduate student.

(Un)Natural Disasters: Distributive Politics in Northeast Brazil

Alicia D. Cooperman, Columbia University

Award Committee: James Garand, Louisiana State University (Chair); Todd Bradley, Indiana University, Kokomo; Marcela Garcia-Castañon, San Francisco State

Committee Commendation: Cooperman explores an interesting and important research question relating to how disaster relief is distributed by incumbent mayors in Northeast Brazil. The politicization of disaster relief throughout the world has drawn the attention of political scientists, and Cooperman uses the exogeneity of the rainfall to explore the effects of political variables on drought declarations. She finds that during mayoral election years mayors from the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) exhibit a greater propensity to declare a drought declaration under both high rainfall and drought conditions, but the opposite pattern is exhibited during state or federal election years. Although this paper is on one region in Brazil, it has important implications for how political scientists study the effects of political variables on disaster relief in other political contexts. We congratulate Alicia Dailey Cooperman for her outstanding work.

 

AJPS Award – Best Paper

A $1,000 award for the best article appearing in the volume of the American Journal of Political Science published in the year preceding the conference.

Policy-Induced Risk and Responsive Participation: The Effect of a Son¹s Conscription Risk on the Voting Behavior of His Parents

Tiffany C. Davenport, United States Naval Academy

Award Committee: Tracy Osborn, University of Iowa (Chair); James Druckman, Northwestern University; Jana Morgan, University of Tennessee

Committee Commendation: Davenport’s work is significant and important. The paper makes a potentially seminal contribution to our understanding of political participation. It leverages a naturally occurring event to make clear causal inferences, adding understanding to individual resource‐related and campaign stimulus explanations for turnout. Within studies on political participation, she moves beyond prior work by offering a clear psychological theory about how risk assessment and context influence individual decisions to vote.

The following awards were presented at the 2015 conference for research presented at the 2014 conference:

 

AJPS Best Article Award

A $1,000 award for the best article appearing in the volume of the American Journal of Political Science preceding the conference.

Title: Group Segregation and Urban Violence (Volume 58, Issue 1, pages 226–245)

Authors: Ravi Bhavnani, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Karsten Donnay, ETH Zürich, Dan Miodownik, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Maayan Mor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Dirk Helbing, ETH Zürich

Award Committee: David Darmofal, University of South Carolina (chair); Matthew Golder, Penn State; Tracy Osborn, University of Iowa

From the committee: Bhavnani, Donnay, Miodownik, Mor, and Helbing’s article, “Group Segregation and Urban Violence”, is an imaginative paper that brings a rigorous research design and methods to bear on an important and timely topic: how does segregation shape intergroup violence in contested urban spaces? The authors argue that social distance – be it religious, ethnic, or ideological, class- or gender-based – is a key mechanism that explains conflict over urban areas. All else equal, higher levels of social distance increase the likelihood that day-to-day contact between members of nominally rival groups leads to violence.

The authors apply agent-based modeling to the demonstration case of Jerusalem, seeding their model with micro-level, geo-coded data on settlement patterns for each of the city’s 77 neighborhoods. One of the most innovative contributions of this paper is to employ agent-based modeling to examine violence under four proposed scenarios for the future status of Jerusalem: “Business-As-Usual”, “Clinton Parameters”, “Palestinian Proposal”, and “Return to 1967.” The authors find that the “Return to 1967” scenario would most dramatically curb violence in the city. They also conclude that although integration is a promising strategy when social distance is small, arrangements to reduce intergroup interactions – including localized segregation, limits on mobility and migration, partition, and differentiation of political authority – can be effective when social distance is great.

Bhavnani et al’s article has several attractive features. In highlighting the importance of social distance it demonstrates the contingent nature of intergroup interactions in conflict-prone settings and identifies an important factor that helps account for whether these interactions will ameliorate or promote conflict. Its use of agent-based modeling demonstrates the utility of this approach, particularly in forecasting the likely consequences of proposed scenarios in real world settings. Finally, the rigorous methods it employs are applied to one of the most consequential and intractable conflicts in the world. For all of these reasons, we believe that “Group Segregation and Urban Violence” is well-deserving of the AJPS Best Article Award.

Best Paper in Comparative Policy Award

A $500 award sponsored by the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice (JCPA) and International Comparative Policy Analysis Forum for the best paper in comparative policy. The winner(s) may submit their paper to JCPA for an expedited triple blind-fold review process.

Title: Ripples from the First Wave: The Monarchical Origins of the Welfare State

Author: Eileen McDonagh, Northeastern University

Award Committee:  Charles Blake, James Madison University (Chair), Christoffer Green-Pedersen, Aarhus University, Denmark, Klaus Schubert, University of Muenster

From the committee:  In a considerable number of settings in the comparative study of policy dynamics, prevailing public attitudes toward government action are presented as a given. In contrast, in this innovative paper, Professor McDonagh argues that the origins of public support for the welfare state in the 20th and 21st centuries can be found in distinctive monarchical legacies. Highly patrimonial regimes demonstrated a familial rhetoric and took courses of action that laid the foundation for future policy development and for public support of government activity in pursuit of public welfare. In contrast, less patrimonial monarchies evolved into more liberal polities with political cultures more focused on individual responsibility for socioeconomic outcomes. Professor McDonagh combines a comparative historical approach with contemporary quantitative analysis to engage in process tracing regarding the origins of distinctive political cultures and of distinctive policy outcomes.  Her work extends the temporal boundaries of the contemporary debate over the causal dynamics of robust welfare states with implications both for future research and for practitioners engaged in social policymaking. 

 

Best Paper by an Emerging Scholar Award

A $250 award given for the best paper, regardless of field of topic, authored by a scholar or scholars who have received their terminal degree(s) no sooner than six years prior to the year in which the paper was delivered.

Title: Social Norms and the Presentation of Partisanship

Authors: Samara Klar, University of Arizona, Yanna Krupnikov, Northwestern University

Award Committee: Leonie Huddy, SUNY Stony Brook (chair); Michael Berkman, Penn State; Raymond Duch, University of Oxford

From the committee:  American political behavior research has established that leaning political independents, those who call themselves independent but lean towards one or the other major political parties, act as consistent partisans. What has remained unclear in past research is why such individuals call themselves independents and not partisans. In this well written, carefully researched, and innovative paper, Klar and Krupnikov find that Americans are more likely to call themselves political independents in climates characterized by partisan disagreement. This is especially the case for high self-monitors, individuals who are highly attuned to social norms and most likely to modify their attitudes and behavior to fit within a specific social context. Partisan disagreement not only pushes Americans towards an independent self-identification it also dampens their political activity. Klar and Krupnikov base their conclusions on four well-designed experiments that show the powerful effects of political disagreement on the avoidance of partisan labels and decreased levels of political engagement.  Their work lends obvious insight into political engagement. It also answers an incredibly important but vastly understudied question: Why do people vary in their attachment to political parties? At a time of intensified partisanship and heightened partisan acrimony, their research is trend setting and timely.

Best Paper in International Relations

A $250 award for the best paper on the topic of international relations.

Title: Modern Day Merchant Guilds: Supply Chains and Informal Property Rights Enforcement

Authors: Leslie Johns, University of California at Los Angeles, Rachel Wellhausen, University of Texas at Austin

Award Committee: Zaryab Iqbal, Penn State (chair); Philip Arena, SUNY Buffalo; Jonathan Renshon, University of Wisconsin, Madison

From the committee:  This paper stands out for both its intellectual and empirical rigor, as well as its creativity. Substantively, it makes the important point that reputational arguments (of the sort invoked not only to explain property rights, but many other outcomes in international relations) hinge upon an often implicit assumption that certain actions will be deterred by punishments no one actually has any interest in carrying out. This is a glaring problem in a number of literatures and it is important to draw attention to it. Methodologically, the paper combines formal theory, statistical analysis, and case studies to great effect. One rarely sees such a wide range of approaches adopted within a single paper. Johns and Wellhausen dexterously use a combination of observational data, surveys case studies, and formal theory to construct a convincing narrative that feels like more than the sum of its parts. While it is common these days to see multi-method approaches, it’s rather unusual to see them carried out so well.

Best Paper Presented in a Poster Format Award

A $250 award for the best poster presentation.

Title: Natural Resources and Recurring Civil War

Author: Vita Thormann, German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA)

Award Committee: Heather Evans, Sam Houston State University (chair); Gwen Arnold, University of California, Davis; Nick Clark, Susquehenna University

From the committee:  Vita Thormann’s paper makes an interesting contribution to the study of the interrelationships among natural resource holdings and conflict by examining how the attributes of bundles of natural resources possessed by a country may make the country more or less vulnerable to recurrence of civil conflict. The paper tests hypotheses about how variation in these bundles, specifically with respect to the lootability of natural resources and the extent to which their expropriation can be feasibly obstructed, can affect the balance of power between state and rebel actors such that post-conflict stability is more or less fragile. Thormann focuses on four classes of goods typed by a two-by-type matrix of lootability and obstructibility, using as his/her empirical focus fuel rents, primary diamond production, secondary diamond production, and contraband goods. The statistical analysis suggests that variation in fuel endowments does not affect the likelihood of conflict recurrence, a finding that contradicts indications in some existing scholarship and thus deserves further investigation. A country’s possession of lootable resources, such as secondary diamonds and contraband resources such as drugs, appear to increase the likelihood of conflict recurrence. The research suggests that these latter resources have some sort of inherently destabilizing impact, the causal mechanism needs further exploration. The research is somewhat limited by its small n, the small number of resource types upon which it focuses, the lack of fine-grained resource classification, and the need for more thorough explication of the resource-related incentives of state and non-state actors vis-a-vis conflict engagement. Nonetheless, the research question is interesting, the theoretical approach is innovative, and the results suggest productive paths for future research.

 

Best Undergraduate Poster Award

A $250 award for the best poster presented by an undergraduate.

Title: Learning in Harm’s Way: The Effects of Neighborhood Violence on School Performance

Author: Elizabeth Froom Pelletier, The College of William and Mary

Award Committee: Jennifer Hayes Clark, University of Houston (chair); Victor Asal, SUNY Albany; John Hulsey, James Madison University

From the committee:  The committee felt that this research was strong both theoretically and methodologically, investigating the very important and timely question of whether geographic proximity to violent crimes affects school performance.  Using sophisticated GIS techniques, Pelletier finds a statistically significant and negative association between proximity to violence and test score results.

Herbert A. Simon Award

A $500 award for a scholar who has made a significant contribution to the scientific study of bureaucracy. Submissions are handled by the Midwest Caucus on Policy Administration.

David Lewis

Award Committee: Midwest Caucus for Public Administration

Kellogg/Notre Dame Award

A $250 award for the best paper in comparative politics.

Title: Reverse Engineering Chinese Censorship through Randomized Experimentation and Participant Observation

Authors: Gary King, Harvard University, Jennifer Pan, Harvard University, Margaret E. Roberts, Harvard University

Award Committee: Robert Rohrschneider, University of Kansas (chair); Chris Blattman, Columbia University; Georgia Kernell, Northwestern University

From the committee: How can one study censorship of internet activities China? This paper applies an ingenious research design to investigate this question. It uses a twofold strategy. First, the study creates numerous social media accounts across China. It then randomly submits different types of messages to these sites. This strategy allows the authors to assess which messages pass the censorship bar-and which ones fail to clear it. Second, the study interviews participants in the censorship process through one of its social media sites. Cumulative, the study reveals that some topics (like corruption) are more likely to be censored than others; but it also indicates that “obvious” topics like government criticism are not automatically censored. The study makes a major contribution by revealing a nuanced portrait of censorship-at-work in China.

Lucius Barker Award

A $250 award for the author or authors of the best paper presented at the annual meeting on a topic investigating race or ethnicity and politics honoring the spirit and work of Professor Barker.

Title: Assessing the Causal Impact of Race-Based Districting on Voter Turnout

Author: Bernard L. Fraga, Indiana University

Award Committee: Ismail White, (chair) Ohio State University; Marisa Abrajano, University of California, San Diego; D. Stephen Voss,University of Kentucky

From the committee: This year’s nominations for the Lucius Barker paper award featured a number of exceptional papers that all nicely embodied the spirit of Dr. Barker’s work and his exceptional contributions to the study of race and ethnic politics.  Although it was not easy given the quality of the papers, the awards committee unanimously selected the paper, “Assessing the Causal Impact of Race-Based Districting on Voter Turnout,” by Benard Fraga as the recipient of the 2015 Lucius Barker paper award. This paper not only addresses an important question within the race and ethnic politics literature but it is meticulously researched and provides  convincing evidence about the causal link between co-racial/ethnic candidates and racial differences in voter turnout. Leveraging the 2012 round of redistricting and examining the turnout behavior of 65 million registered voters from 10 states, Fraga demonstrates that the presence of a co-racial candidate interacts with the racial makeup of an individual’s new congressional district to alter the individual’s propensity to turnout and vote.  He finds that when moved into districts that feature both co-racial candidates and significantly greater proportions of co-racial constitutes, the probability of voting increases for both blacks and whites  while it decreases for Latinos. The paper is innovative, a pleasure to read and we look forward to seeing it in print.

Patrick J. Fett Award

A $250 award for best paper on the scientific study of Congress and the presidency.

Title: Legislative Style

Authors: William Bernhard, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Tracy Sulkin, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Daniel Sewell, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Award Committee: George Edwards, Texas A&M (chair); David Canon, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Michael Ensley, Kent State University

From the committee:  The authors focus on defining and analyzing how members of the House allocate their time and effort, their “legislative style.”  They categorize a large number of representatives’ activities them into indices composing legislative style and then use model-based clustering approaches to uncover how these components cluster together. Their sophisticated and rigorous analysis reveals that representatives’ legislative styles are predictable and relatively stable across time.  Their findings have important implications for our understanding of legislators’ careers, the quality of constituency representation, and the nature of policy outcomes.

 

Review of Politics Award

A $250 award for the best paper in normative political theory.

Title: Corruption and the Problem of Patronage in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories

Author: Amanda Maher, University of Chicago

Award Committee: Joan Tronto, University of Minnesota (chair); Patrick Deneen, Notre Dame University; Peter Lindsay, Georgia State University

From the committee:  In this paper, part of her dissertation project, Maher offers an original reading of Machiavelli, focusing on a work (Florentine Histories) that is widely neglected among political theorists. She argues that Machiavelli combined moral concerns with a socio-historical analysis that offers us a powerful way to understand the nature of republican virtue. This paper is sophisticated and well-argued, and will surely become an important part of the scholarship on Machiavelli and republican virtue for years to come.

Robert H. Durr Award

A $250 award for best paper applying quantitative methods to a substantive problem.

Title: Encouraging Small Donor Contributions: Field Experiments Testing the Effects of Nonpartisan Messages

Authors: Donald P. Green, Columbia University, Jonathan S. Krasno, Binghamton University

Costas Panagopoulos, Harvard University, Benjamin Farrer, Hobart and William Smith College, Michael Schwam-Baird, Columbia University

Award Committee: Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Ohio State University (chair); Andrew Gelman, Columbia University; Gabriel Lenz,University of California, Berkeley

From the committee:  The paper uses a field experiment conducted in New York City, New Jersey, and Virginia during the 2013 election cycle to examine the feasibility of using nonpartisan messages to increase donations from small contributors, which is a particularly important question in the current campaign finance system in place. The authors use a forecasting model to identify those voters most likely to donate based on observed covariates from voter registration and turnout records. Among those voters with above-average estimated probabilities of donating, they randomize a variety of non-partisan messages that encourage the recipients to give to the candidate of their choice. They remind randomly selected subjects in New York City that small donations are matched by public funds and in Virginia that small donations are subject to a tax credit. Donations, the outcome variable, are measured using donor surveys and public databases of campaign contributions. The suite of experiments represents the first attempt to assess nonpartisan outreach to small donors. They find that a simple, non‐partisan appeal can increase the yield of donations. They also find that there was less success growing the number of donors than in increasing the size of the average donation.

Sophonisba Breckinridge Award

A $250 award for the best paper delivered on women and politics.

Title: Women and Men from Different sides of the Wall:  Gender Attitudes, Institutions, and Political Participation in Unified Germany

Authors: Sarah Glatte, Oxford University, Catherine E. de Vries, Oxford University

Award Committee: Kim Fridkin, Arizona State University (chair); Alice Kang, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Christina Wolbrecht, University of Notre Dame

From the committee:  The Glatte and de Vries paper proposes an original theory that gender regimes have a long-term effect on citizens’ attitudes and political behavior, even after the regimes are no longer in place. Leveraging the division and reunification of Germany in the second half of the 20th century, the authors identify a novel natural experiment for testing their theory. With data from the German General Social Survey (1990-2010), the authors find that people who grew up in pre-unified West Germany hold more traditional attitudes about gender than do their counterparts who grew up in pre-unified East Germany. Further, the authors find that the contemporary gender gap in political participation (specifically, being politically interested and being a party member) is narrower in former East Germany than in former West Germany. By comparing cohorts that were socialized under different gender regimes and then brought together under one unified system, Glatte and de Vries make a significant contribution to the scholarship on gender institutionalism, political behavior, and political culture.

Westview Press Award

A $250 award sponsored by Westview Press for best paper by delivered by a graduate student.

Title: Can Inclusive Institutional Reform Reduce Political Violence? Field Evidence on Village Governance and Conflict in India

Author: Benjamin Pasquale, New York University

Award Committee: Shaun Bowler, University of California, Riverside (chair); Adam Seth-Levine, Cornell University; Wendy Pearlman, Northwestern University

From the committee:  His paper asks an important question, uses innovative methods to answer it, involves a significant amount of original data collection, and carefully examines several different mechanisms underlying the pattern of results.  It is a very clearly written paper with a great balance between detailed knowledge of a particular case and theorization of general relationships; convincing contribution with empirical, theoretical, and policy implications. Pasquale uses a sophisticated research design that shows high methodological skills (an original household survey with special methods to protect respondents’ anonymity; discontinuity-style field research design; great careful original data collection involving overseas fieldwork and non-English language research. Ultimately (perhaps most importantly) he makes an important contribution to our understanding of the relationship between institutions and political violence. It is a truly impressive paper.

The following awards were presented at the 2014 conference for research presented at the 2013 conference:

AJPS Best Article Award.

A $1,000 award for the best article appearing in the volume of the American Journal of Political Science preceding the conference.

Winners: Kate Baldwin, Yale University

Title: “Why Vote with the Chief? Political Connections and the Performance of Representatives in Zambia”

Award Committee: Harvey D. Palmer, SUNY Buffalo (Chair); John Patty, Washington University in St. Louis; Orit Kedar, Hebrew University

 

Best Paper in Comparative Policy Award.

A $500 award sponsored by the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice (JCPA) and International Comparative Policy Analysis Forum for the best paper in comparative policy. The winner(s) may submit their paper to JCPA for an expedited triple blind-fold review process.

Winners: Edmund James Malesky, Duke University, Cuong Viet Nguyen, National Economics University, Hanoi, and Anh Ngoc Tran, Indiana University

Title: “The Economic Impact of Recentralization: A Quasi-Experiment on Abolishing Elected Councils in Vietnam”

Award Committee: Charles Blake, James Madison University (Chair); Joshua  Sapotichne, Michigan State University, Christoffer Green-Pederson, Aarhus University, Denmark

Citation from the Committee: The potential benefits from centralizing or decentralizing government have been hotly debated in the praxis and study of comparative public administration for many years. This innovative project employs a quasi-experimental approach to isolating the impact of centralization by comparing outcomes in Vietnam from regions that were recentralized with those found in regions that remained decentralized.  In addition to providing a theoretically informed empirical project, the authors glean a series of potential lessons for practitioners in Vietnam and elsewhere. In addition to the strength of their research design, the authors express forthrightly the merits and the limitations of their findings.

 

Best Paper by an Emerging Scholar Award.

A $250 award given for the best paper, regardless of field of topic, authored by a scholar or scholars who have received their terminal degree(s) no sooner than six years prior to the year in which the paper was delivered.

Winners: Eitan Hersh, Yale University, and Clayton M. Nall, Stanford University

Title: “The Primacy of Race in the Geography of Income-Based Voting: New Evidence from Public Voting Records”

Award Committee: Lynn Vavreck, University of California, Los Angeles (Chair); Jay Goodliffe, Brigham Young University; Cindy Kam, Vanderbilt University

 

Best Paper in International Relations.

A $250 award for the best paper on the topic of international relations.

No winner was selected for papers submitted in 2013.

Award Committee: Allan Stam, University of Michigan (Chair); Lisa Martin, University of Wisconsin; Johannes Urpelainen, Columbia University

 

Best Poster Award.

A $250 award for the best poster presentation.

No winner was selected for papers submitted in 2013.

Award Committee: Jennifer Jerit, Florida State University (Chair); Kevin Arceneaux, Temple University; Elizabeth Suhay, Laffayete College

 

Best Undergraduate Poster Award.

A $250 award for the best poster presented by an undergraduate.

Winner: Brittany Shanielle Macon, University of the South

Title: “Gender vs. Racial Descriptive Representation: An Analysis of Voter Preferences When Evaluating Candidates”

Award Committee: Clyde Wilcox, Georgetown University (Chair); Byron D’Andra Orey, Jackson State University; Cheryl Boudreau, University of California, Davis

Committee Citation:  This poster explored questions of race and gender in evaluating hypothetical and real African American male and white female candidates.  The project includes a good review of the literature, a well-designed survey experiment, and a thoughtful discussion of the results.  It was sensitive to the possible confounding effects of ideology, while controlling for partisanship.  Overall this is a strong project that augers well for the career of this student.

Herbert A. Simon Award.

A $500 award for a scholar who has made a significant contribution to the scientific study of bureaucracy. Submissions are handled by the Midwest Caucus on Policy Administration.

Winners: John Brehm and Scott Gates

Award Committee: Midwest Caucus for Public Administration

Kellogg/Notre Dame Award.

A $250 award for the best paper in comparative politics.

Co-Winners: Janet Ingram Lewis, Harvard University, and Guy Grossman, University of Pennsylvania

Title: “Intergovernmental Balance of Power and Administrative Unit Proliferation”

Co-Winners: Fernando Daniel Hidalgo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Simeon Nichter, University of California, San Diego

Title: “Voter Buying:  Shaping the Electorate through Clientelism”

Award Committee: Kaare Strom, University of California, San Diego (Chair): Bonnie Meguid, University of Rochester; Eric Magar, Instituto Tecnologico Autonono de Mexico

Lucius Barker Award.

A $250 award for the author or authors of the best paper presented at the annual meeting on a topic investigating race or ethnicity and politics honoring the spirit and work of Professor Barker.

Winners: Camille D. Burge, Vanderbilt University, and Cindy Kam, Vanderbilt University

Title: “The Meaning and Implications of Racial Resentment across the Racial Divide”

Award Committee: Ted Carmines, Indiana University (Chair); David Wilson, University of Delaware; Candis Watts-Smith, Williams College

 

Patrick J. Fett Award.

A $250 award for best paper on the scientific study of Congress and the presidency.

Winners: Joshua Clinton, Vanderbilt University, Molly Jackman, Stanford University and Saul Jackman, Vanderbilt University

Title: “Characterizing the Chief Executive: Using the Electoral Connection to Estimate Presidential Positions”

Award Committee: Charles Stewart, MIT (Chair); Gisela Sin, University of Illinois; Craig Volden, University of Virginia

 

Pi Sigma Alpha Award.

A $250 award for the best paper presented at the MPSA Annual National Conference. Sponsored by Pi Sigma Alpha, the national political science honor society.

Co-Winners: Eitan Hersh, Yale University, and Clayton M. Nall, Stanford University

Title: “The Primacy of Race in the Geography of Income-Based Voting: New Evidence from Public Voting Records”

Co-Winners:  Jenny Guardado, New York University

Title: “Sale of Colonial Appointments and Rent Extraction”

Award Committee: Amaney Jamal, Princeton University (Chair); Dara Strolovitch, University of Minnesota; Will Howell,University of Chicago

 

Review of Politics Award.

A $250 award for the best paper in normative political theory.

Winners: Jim Josefson, Bridgewater College

Title: “Imagination and Spirit in Kant and Arendt”

Award Committee: Lisa Disch, University of Michigan (Chair); Peter Steinberger, Reed College; Ted Miller, University of Alabama

Robert H. Durr Award.

A $250 award for best paper applying quantitative methods to a substantive problem.

Winners: Barry C. Burden, University of Wisconsin, David Canon, University of Wisconsin, Kenneth Mayer, University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Donald Moynihan, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Title: “Election Laws and Partisan Gains: What are the Effects of Early Voting and Same Day Registration on the Parties’ Vote Shares”

Award Committee: Simon Jackman, Stanford University (Chair); Sean Gailmard, University of California, Berkeley; Suzanna Linn, Penn State University

 

Sophonisba Breckinridge Award.

A $250 award for the best paper delivered on women and politics.

Winners: Alan E. Wiseman, Vanderbilt University, Dana  E. Wittmer, Colorado College, and  Craig Volden, University of Virginia

Title: “Women’s Issues and Their Fates in Congress”

Award Committee: Kira Sanbonmatsu, Rutgers University (Chair); Kathy Dolan, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Jennifer Wolak, University of Colorado

 

Westview Press Award.

A $250 award sponsored by Westview Press for best paper by delivered by a graduate student.

Co-Winner: Adrian Lucardi, Washington University, St. Louis

Title: “The Curse of Revenue-Sharing: Assessing the Subnational Impact of Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers”

Committee Citation: In “The Curse of Revenue-Sharing? Assessing the Impact of Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers at the Subnational Level,” Adrian Lucardi, Ph.D. candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, examines the relationship between intergovernmental fiscal transfers and the quality of life across various jurisdictions in a country.  Based on a review of prior theoretical and empirical literature, Lucardi argues that subnational governments that raise their own taxes should be more responsive to their citizens, but that receiving more transfers from the center will not increase their provision of government services.  He finds support for both hypotheses, using an ambitious, time-series cross-sectional dataset of Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, and an innovative research design that uses legislative overrepresentation as an instrument for intergovernmental transfers, and takes infant mortality as a standard measures across time and countries.  This paper is well conceived and executed, and is a promising foundation for a successful academic career.

Co-Winner: Viktoryia Schnose, Washington University, St. Louis

Title: “Bureaucratic Drift in Comparative Perspective”

Award Committee: Karthick Ramakrishnan, University of California, Riverside (Chair); Kirk Randazzo, University of South Carolina; Joanne Miller, University of Minnesota

Committee Citation:   In “Who is in Charge Here: Legislators, Bureaucrats and the Policy Making Process,” Viktoryia Schnose, Ph.D. candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, argues that cross-country variation in bureaucracies are an important yet often overlooked factor in the development of public policies in democracies.  She hypothesizes that institutions that govern the nomination process by which parties in government select bureaucrats (meritocratic vs partisan recruitment) determine the levels of bureaucratic involvement in the policy making process, especially with respect to policy volatility.  She tests these hypotheses using two different datasets, of 20 European countries and 152 world countries, respectively, and employs innovative ways to measure potential discretion in budgetary decisions and other policy volatility.  This paper is an excellent candidate for revision and submission to a high-impact peer reviewed journal, and is a promising foundation for a successful academic career.

The following awards were presented at the 2013 conference for research presented at the 2012 conference:

AJPS Best Article Award.

A $1,000 award, sponsored by Wiley Blackwell Publishing, for the best article appearing in the volume of the American Journal of Political Science preceding the conference.

Winners: John S. Ahlquist, University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Erik Wibbels, Duke University

Title: “Riding the Wave: World Trade and Factor-Based Models of Democratization” Volume 56, Issue 2, pp. 447-464

Award Committee: Christina Wolbrecht, University of Notre Dame (Chair): Kelly Kadera, University of Iowa; Irfan Nooruddin, The Ohio State University

Best Paper by an Emerging Scholar Award.

A $250 award for the best paper, regardless of field or topic, authored by a scholar or scholars who have received their terminal degree(s) within six years of the year of the meeting at which the paper was delivered.

Winner: Matt Grossmann, Michigan State University

Title: “How Much Do Agendas Matter? Issue Attention and Policy Change”

Award Committee: Stephen Nicholson, University of California, Merced (Chair); Brady Baybeck, Wayne State University; Jennifer Wolak, University of Colorado

 

Best Paper in Comparative Policy Award.

A $500 award sponsored by the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice (JCPA) and International Comparative Policy Analysis Forum for the best paper in comparative policy. The winner(s) may submit their paper to JCPA for an expedited triple blind-fold review process.

Winner: Carla M. Flink, Texas A&M University

Title: “Strength of Fiscal Bureaucracy and Budget Changes”

Award Committee: Charles H. Blake, James Madison University (Chair); Christoffer Green-Pedersen, University of Aarhus, Denmark; Meghna Sabharwal, University of Texas at Dallas

 

Best Paper in International Relations.

A $250 award for the best paper in international relations.

Winners: Emily Hencken Ritter, University of Alabama, and Courtenay R. Conrad, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Title: “International Human Rights Treaties and Mobilized Challenges against the State”

Award Committee: Caroline Hartzell, Gettysburg College (Chair); David Clark, SUNY, Binghamton; Daniel Reiter, Emory University

Best Paper Presented in a Poster Format.

A $250 award for the best paper presented in a poster format.

Winner: Andrea Stephanie Aldrich, University of Pittsburgh

Title: “Strategic Parties in the European Parliament: Competition, Bias, and Voting in Empirical Assessments of Party Strength”

Award Committee: Brigid Harrison, Montclair State University (Chair); Lisa Hilbink, University of Minnesota; Isaac Unah, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Best Undergraduate Paper Presented in a Poster Format.

A $250 award for the best undergraduate paper presented in a poster format.

Winner: Tyler Petersen, University of St. Thomas

Title: “Bringing Home the Bacon: How Does Slicing the Pork Affect the Electability and Fundraising of Congressional Candidates?”

Award Committee: Tyson King-Meadows, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (Chair); Sherri Wallace, University of Louisville

Herbert A. Simon Award.

A $500 award for a scholar who has made a significant contribution to the scientific study of bureaucracy. Submissions are handled by the Midwest Caucus on Policy Administration.

Winner: Lael R. Keiser

Award Committee: Midwest Caucus for Public Administration

Kellogg/Notre Dame Award.

A $250 award for the best paper in comparative politics.

Winners: Benjamin Helge Neudorfer, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and Natascha Simone Neudorfer, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Title: “Decentralization and Political Corruption: Disaggregating Regional Authority”

Award Committee: Sona Golder, Pennsylvania State University (Chair); Jennifer Seely, Earlham College; Alex Pacek, Texas A&M University

Lucius Barker Award.

A $250 award for the author or authors of the best paper on a topic investigating race or ethnicity and politics and honoring the spirit and work of Professor Barker.

Winners: Lonna Atkeson, University of New Mexico, Shannon Sanchez-Youngman, University of New Mexico, and Alex N. Adams, University of New Mexico

Title: “Latino Descriptive Voting: Evidence in the 2010 Gubernatorial Race in New Mexico”

Award Committee: David Leal, University of Texas, Austin (Chair); Gabriel Sanchez, University of New Mexico; Jamila Michener, University of Michigan

 

Patrick J. Fett Award.

A $250 award for the best paper on the scientific study of Congress and the Presidency.

Winner: Charles Stewart III, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Title: “The Value of Committee Assignments in Congress since 1994”

Award Committee: E. Scott Adler, University of Colorado (Chair); Frances E. Lee, University of Maryland; Andrew Rudalevige, Dickinson College

 

Pi Sigma Alpha Award.

A $250 award for the best paper delivered at the conference.

Winners: Jason Lyall, Yale University, Graeme Blair, Princeton University, and Kosuke Imai, Princeton University

Title: “Explaining Support for Combatants during Wartime: A Survey Experiment in Afghanistan”

Award Committee: Jane Junn, University of Southern California (Chair); Cara Wong, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Jason Wittenberg, University of California, Berkeley

 

Review of Politics Award.

A $250 award for the best paper in normative political theory.

Winner: Brandon P. Turner, Clemson University

Title: “Privates Vices, Public Benefits: Mandragola and Antagonism in Machiavelli’s Political Thought”

Award Committee: Michael Neblo, The Ohio State University (Chair); Marek Steedman, University of Southern Mississippi; Michaele Ferguson, University of Colorado

 

Robert H. Durr Award.

A $250 award for the best paper applying quantitative methods to a substantive problem in political science.

Winner: Yanna Krupnikov, Northwestern University

Title: “Who Participates?: Reconsidering the Relationship between Attitudes and Actions”

Award Committee: James Granato, University of Houston (Chair); Corrine McConnaughy, The Ohio State University; Jake Bowers, University of Illinois

 

Sophonisba Breckinridge Award.

A $250 award for the best paper delivered on the topic of women and politics.

Winner: Sarah Poggione, Ohio University

Title: “Gender Differences in Policymaking Activities”

Award Committee: Lisa Baldez, Dartmouth College (Chair); Heather Ondercin, University of Mississippi; Nicholas Winter, University of Virginia

 

Westview Press Award.

A $250 award for the best paper delivered by a graduate student.

Winner: Rory Truex, Yale University

Title: “Co-optation or Specialization? Politics and Policy in China’s Highest Congress”

Award Committee: Patrick Egan, New York University (Chair); Zoe Oxley, Union College; Duane Swank, Marquette University

The following awards were presented at the 2012 conference for research presented at the 2011 conference:

AJPS Best Article Award

A $1,000 award, sponsored by Wiley Blackwell Publishing, for the best article appearing in the volume of the American Journal of Political Science preceding the conference.

Winners: James Adams, University of California, Davis, Lawrence Ezrow, University of Essex, and Zeynep Somer-Topcu, Vanderbilt University

Title: “Is Anybody Listening? Evidence That Voters Do Not Respond to European Parties’ Policy Statements During Elections” Volume 55, Issue 2, pp. 370-382

Award Committee: James Fowler, University of California, San Diego, Chair; Brandon Bartels, George Washington University; and Kyle Joyce, University of California, Davis

 

Best Paper by an Emerging Scholar Award.

A $250 award for the best paper, regardless of field or topic, authored by a scholar or scholars who have received their terminal degree(s) within six years of the year of the meeting at which the paper was delivered.

Winners: Christopher Ellis, Bucknell University, and Patrick C. Wohlfarth, Washington University in St. Louis

Title: “Political Context and Regulatory Decision Making: The Impact of Public Opinion on Decentralized Policy Enforcement”

Award Committee: Chris Wlezien, Temple University, Chair; Jacqueline DeMeritt, University of North Texas; Vera Troeger, University of Essex

 

Best Paper in International Relations.

A $250 award for the best paper in international relations.

Winners: Jennifer L. Merolla, Claremont Graduate University, J. Daniel Montalvo, Vanderbilt University, and Elizabeth J. Zechmeister, Vanderbilt University

Title: “Terrorism and Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean?”

Award Committee: David Bearce, University of Colorado, Chair; Sara Croco, University of Maryland; Megan Shannon, University of Mississippi

 

Best Poster Award.

A $250 award for the best poster presentation.

Winner: Marius Radean, Florida State University

Title: “The Conditional Effect of Cabinet Membership on Party Switching”

Award Committee: Sona Golder, Pennsylvania State University, Chair; Kentaro Fukumoto, Gakushuin University; Paul Herrnson, University of Maryland; Kris Miler, University of Illinois

 

Best Undergraduate Poster Award.

A $250 award for the best poster presented by an undergraduate.

Winner: Casey S. Crisman-Cox, Pennsylvania State University

Title: “Terrorism, Democracies, and Partisanship: Interactions between Governments and Intrastate Terrorist Groups”

Award Committee: Steve Frantzich, U.S. Naval Academy, Chair; George Marcus, Williams College; Grant Neeley, University of Dayton

 

Herbert A. Simon Award.

A $500 award for a scholar who has made a significant contribution to the scientific study of bureaucracy. Submissions are handled by the Midwest Caucus on Policy Administration.

Winner: George Krause

Award Committee: Midwest Caucus for Public Administration

Kellogg/Notre Dame Award.

A $250 award for the best paper in comparative politics.

Winner: Christian Houle, Trinity College, Dublin

Title: “Consolidating Democracy in Plural Societies: Ethnic Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa”

Award Committee: Mikki Kittilson, Arizona State University, Chair; Michelle Dion, McMaster University; Ray Duch, University of Oxford

 

Lucius Barker Award.

A $250 award for the author or authors of the best paper on a topic investigating race or ethnicity and politics and honoring the spirit and work of Professor Barker.

Winner: Efrén O. Pérez, Vanderbilt University

Title: “Black Ice? Race and the Political Psychology of Implicit Bias”

Award Committee: Matt Barreto, University of Washington, Chair; Rodolfo Espino, Arizona State University; Ismail White, The Ohio State University

 

 

Patrick J. Fett Award.

A $250 award for the best paper on the scientific study of Congress and the Presidency.

Winners: Samuel Kernell, University of California, San Diego, and Scott A. MacKenzie, University of California, Davis

Title: “From Political Careers to Career Politicians”

Award Committee: Shawn Trier, University of Minnesota, Chair; Scott Meinke, Bucknell University; Jennifer Nicoll Victor, University of Pittsburgh

 

Pi Sigma Alpha Award.

A $250 award for the best paper delivered at the conference.

Winners: Nicholas Charron, University of Gothenburg, and Victor Lapuente, University of Gothenburg

Title: “Why Do Some Regions in Europe Have Higher Quality of Government?”

Award Committee: John Scholz, Florida State University, Chair; Jason Mycoff, University of Delaware; Corwin Smidt, Michigan State University

Review of Politics Award.

A $250 award for the best paper in normative political theory.

Winner: J. S. Maloy, Oklahoma State University

Title: “Ancient and Medieval Antecedents of Reason of State: Skepticism and Pragmatism”

Award Committee: Eric MacGilvray, The Ohio State University, Chair; Aurelian Craiutu, Indiana University; Lisa Ellis, Texas A&M University

 

Robert H. Durr Award.

A $250 award for the best paper applying quantitative methods to a substantive problem in political science.

Winners: Jens Hainmueller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Dominik Hangartner, University of California, Berkeley

Title: “Who Gets a Swiss Passport? A Natural Experiment in Immigrant Discrimination”

Award Committee: Fred Boehmke, University of Iowa, Chair; Dino Christenson, Boston University; Jas Sekhon, University of California, Berkeley

 

Sophonisba Breckinridge Award.

A $250 award for the best paper delivered on the topic of women and politics.

Winner: Melody Crowder-Meyer, The University of the South

Title: “Candidate Recruitment and Party Networks: How the Beliefs and Behavior of Local Party Leaders Affect Women’s Representation”

AND

Winner: Sarah A. Fulton, Texas A&M University

Title: “When Gender Matters: Partisanship, Ideological Proximity and Valence”

Award Committee: Lee Ann Banaszak, Pennsylvania State University, Chair; Amber Boydstun, University of California, Davis; Kira Sanbonmatsu, Rutgers University

 

Westview Press Award.

A $250 award for the best paper delivered by a graduate student.

Winner: Laura Paler, Columbia University

Title: “Keeping the Public Purse: An Experiment in Windfalls, Taxes and Transparency”

Award Committee: Paul Collins, University of North Texas, Chair; Amanda Licht, University of South Carolina; Anand Sokhey, University of Colorado

The following awards will be presented at the 2011 conference for research presented at the 2010 conference:

AJPS Best Article Award

A $1,000 award, sponsored by Wiley Blackwell Publishing, for the best article appearing in the volume of the American Journal of Political Science preceding the conference.

Winners: Torun Dewan, London School of Economics and Political Science, and David P. Myatt, University of Oxford

Title: “The Declining Talent Pool of Government” Volume 54, Issue 2, pp. 267-286, April 2010

Award Committee: Raymond Duch, Nuffield College, University of Oxford (Chair); Evelyne Huber, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Andy Whitford, University of Georgia

 

Best Paper by an Emerging Scholar Award

A $250 award for the best paper, regardless of field or topic, authored by a scholar or scholars who have received their terminal degree(s) within six years of the year of the meeting at which the paper was delivered.

Winner: Elizabeth Albright, Loyola University Chicago

Title: “Policy Change and Policy Learning in a New Democracy: Response to Extreme Floods in Hungary”

Award Committee: Hal G. Rainey, University of Georgia (Chair); Peter C. John, University of Manchester; Michael MacKuen, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

 

Best Paper in International Relations

A $250 award for the best paper in international relations.

Winners: Daniel Corstange, University of Maryland, and Nikolay Marinov, Yale University

Title: “Partisan Polarization When Foreigners Intervene in Elections: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Lebanon”

Award Committee: Richard Herrmann, The Ohio State University (Chair); Terrence Chapman, University of Texas, Austin; Terry D. Clark, Creighton University

 

Best Poster Award

A $250 award for the best poster presentation.

Winners: Alexander C. Tan, University of Canterbury; Nehemia Geva, Texas A&M University; and Belinda Bragg, Texas A&M University

Title: “To Join or Not To Join: An Experimental Study of Small Parties in Coalition Formation”

Award Committee: Heather A. Larsen-Price, University of Memphis (Chair); Frank R. Baumgartner, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Jeffrey S. Peake, Bowling Green State University

 

Best Undergraduate Poster Award

A $250 award for the best poster presented by an undergraduate.

Winner: Jonathan Backer, Columbia University

Title: “Clean Money and Quality Challengers: The Impact of State Legislative Public Financing on Incumbency Advantage”

Award Committee: Fred Slocum, Minnesota State University, Mankato (Chair); Ashley E. Jochim, University of Washington; Christopher Larimer, University of Northern Iowa

 

Hebert A. Simon Award

A $500 award for a scholar who has made a significant contribution to the scientific study of bureaucracy. Submissions are handled by the Midwest Caucus on Policy Administration.

Winner: Dan Carpenter

Award Committee: Midwest Caucus for Public Administration

Kellogg/Notre Dame Award

A $250 award for the best paper in comparative politics.

Winner: Christian Houle, University of Rochester

Title: “Inequality, Economic Development, and Democratization”

Award Committee: Melanie Manion, University of Wisconsin, Madison (Chair); Leslie Anderson, University of Florida; Cynthia Horne, Western Washington University

 

Lucius Barker Award

A $250 award for the author or authors of the best paper on a topic investigating race or ethnicity and politics and honoring the spirit and work of Professor Barker.

Winners: Corrine M. McConnaughy, Ohio State University; Ismail K. White, Ohio State University; and Chryl Laird, Ohio State University

Title: “Racial Politics Complicated: The Work of Gendered Race Cues in American Politics”

and

Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz, University of Rhode Island

Title: “Beyond Democracy’s Reach: Latino Segregation and Political Participation”

Award Committee: Mark Q. Sawyer, University of California, Los Angeles (Chair); David L. Leal, University of Texas at Austin; Naomi Murakawa, University of Washington

 

Patrick J. Fett Award

A $250 award for the best paper on the scientific study of Congress and the Presidency.

Winner: Brandon Rottinghaus, University of Houston

Title: “The Role of Active Opinion in Presidential Responsiveness to Public Opinion”

Award Committee: John Wilkerson, University of Washington (Chair); Richard Fleisher, Fordam University; Tim J. Groseclose, University of California, Los Angeles

 

Pi Sigma Alpha Award

A $250 award for the best paper delivered at the conference.

Winners: Jeffrey R. Lax, Columbia University, and Justin H. Phillips, Columbia University

Title: “Democratic Performance in the States”

Award Committee: Christopher Wlezien, Temple University (Chair); Matt A. Barreto, University of Washington; William G. Howell, University of Chicago

 

Review of Politics Award

A $250 award for the best paper in normative political theory.

Winner: William B. Parsons, Carroll College

Title: “Chapter 19 of The Prince: Crime, Christianity, and the Challenge of Moral Flexibility”

Award Committee: Lorraine Pangle, University of Texas, Austin (Chair); Robert Grafstein, University of Georgia; Mika LaVaque-Manty, University of Michigan

 

Robert H. Durr Award

A $250 award for the best paper applying quantitative methods to a substantive problem in political science.

Winners: Rachel V. Cobb, Suffolk University; D. James Greiner, Harvard Law School; and Kevin M. Quinn, University of California Berkeley School of Law

Title: “Can Voter ID Laws Be Administered in a Race-Neutral Manner? Evidence from the City of Boston in 2008”

Award Committee: Marco Robert Steenbergen, University of Bern (Chair); Patrick Brandt, University of Texas, Dallas; J. Kevin Corder, Western Michigan University

 

Sophonisba Breckinridge Award

A $250 award for the best paper delivered on the topic of women and politics.

Winner: Lana Obradovic, East Asia International College, Yonsei University

Title: “Being All She Can Be: Gender Integration in NATO Military Forces”

Award Committee: Christina Wolbrecht, University of Notre Dame (Chair); Amy G. Mazur, Washington State University; Kathryn L. Pearson, University of Minnesota

 

Westview Press Award

A $250 award for the best paper delivered by a graduate student.

Winner: John Hudak, Vanderbilt University

Title: “The Politics of Federal Grants: Presidential Influence Over the Distribution of Federal Funds”

Award Committee: Beth Leech, Rutgers University (Chair); Benjamin B. Smith, University of Florida; Ishmail White, The Ohio State University