Dissertation Awards
Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in the field of comparative politics
Recipient: Nicholas Kuipers, University of California, Berkeley
Title: “Meritocracy Reconsidered: The Politics of Civil Service Recruitment”
Award Committee: Chair: Dr. Marcus Kreuzer, Villanova University; Moises Arce, Tulane University; Dr. Vineeta Yadav, Pennsylvania State University
Award Citation: Nicholas Kuipers’ “Meritocracy Reconsidered” impressed the selection committee by posing an interesting question, extending the existing literature on civil service reform, and drawing on a wide range of evidence to validate its causal claims. Kuipers grounds the dissertation in an empirical puzzle. He observes that civil service appointments in Indonesia led to repeated and at times violent public outbursts. He employs this puzzle to problematize the conventional wisdom that shifting from clientelistic to a meritocratic civil service selection is crucial for maximizing economic growth and building a modern state. The dissertation qualifies this received wisdom. It shows that merit-based civil service selection can act at cross-purpose with state building in ethnically heterogeneous post-colonial states. It demonstrates that competitive, merit-based entrance exams often privilege ethnic groups that either are politically dominant or socio-economically privileged. Entrance exams thus are never entirely neutral. They often reinforce existing ethnic and economic divisions and impede horizontal forms of solidarity that are necessary for nation building. The dissertation shows that Indonesia’s departure from a merit-based system and the inclusion of clientelistic practices offers a middle path of contributing to the dual goal of state and nation building.
Kuipers offers a carefully crafted comparative historical argument. It draws on historical sources, survey data, and entrance exam data to validate its causal claims. He also provides a theoretically unusually rich and well-grounded argument that spells out the causal logic in great detail and leaves few black boxes. Furthermore, Kuipers addresses the limitations of a single case study. He uses contemporary and historical shadow cases to explicate the argument’s external validity. Finally, Kuipers extends the existing, and still largely Western centric literature to the Global South. He favors building on existing theories over what Jeffrey Checkel called the “gladiatorial style of hypothesis testing where one hypothesis has to slay all others.” Kuipers shows that careful theorizing combined with multiple causal inference strategies can produce research that is problem driven, conceptually innovative, and methodically rigorous.
William Anderson Award for the best dissertation in the general field of federalism or intergovernmental relations, state, and local politics
Recipient: Bhumi Purohit, University of California, Berkeley
Title: “Laments of Getting Things Done: Bureaucratic Resistance Against Female Politicians in India”
Award Committee: Chair: Dr. Louise Tillin, King’s College London; Dr. Charles R. Hankla, Georgia State University; Sara Niedzwiecki, University of California, Santa Cruz
Award Citation: This thesis presents a path-breaking examination of bureaucratic resistance to locally elected women politicians in India. It is the first study to systematically examine the gendered nature of bureaucratic resistance at the local level, three decades after decentralization reforms introduced quotas for women in local elections. Based on new survey data collated among local bureaucrats and female politicians, the thesis demonstrates that bureaucrats exhibit bias against elected female politicians, expecting them to be less effective in implementing policies, less able to organize local communities to pressure the state, and that female elected village heads are significantly more likely than their male counterparts to report bureaucratic resistance. Local bureaucrats are often described as being forced to ration resources and time. This very fine contribution to our understanding of local politics and power in India provides a convincing explanation for how they make such decisions.
Edward S. Corwin Award for the best dissertation in the field of public law
Recipient: Sam Hayes, Boston College
Title: “Courtroom Cartography: How Federal Court Redistricting Has Shaped American Democracy from Baker to Rucho”
Award Committee: Chair: Dr. Christina L. Boyd, University of Georgia; Todd A. Curry, University of Texas at El Paso; Dr. Charles R. Venator-Santiago, University of Connecticut
Award Citation: “Courtroom Cartography” is a timely and important dissertation project that is ambitious in scope, length, methodology, and topic. In it, the author details the role played by federal US courts in drawing legislative district maps since the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Baker v. Carr in 1962. It compellingly examines court roles in this process from a variety of perspectives, from collecting and studying redistricting cases decided in lower federal courts from 1960 to 2019, to evaluating the changing governing standards crafted by the Supreme Court, to comparing the composition of federal court drawn maps to those crafted by other institutions. While its contributions to scholarship are many, one of the dissertation’s most noteworthy is its finding that courts utilize distinct criteria from other institutions in creating legislative district maps. Courts, the author finds, favor maps with strict population equality and compactness, among other factors, but do not prioritize competitive elections or incumbency protection.
Harold D. Lasswell Award for the best dissertation in the field of public policy
Recipient: Michael Lerner, University of Michigan
Title: “Green Catalysts? The Impact of Transnational Advocacy on Environmental Policy Leadership”
Award Committee: Chair: Harold Pollack, University of Chicago; Mr. Paasha Mahdavi, University of California, Santa Barbara; Ana Catalano Weeks, University of Bath
Sam Hayes receives his award.
Award Citation: The selection committee is delighted to announce that the winner of the 2023 Harold D. Lasswell Award for the best dissertation in the field of public policy is Michael Lerner. Dr. Lerner completed his dissertation, “Green Catalysts? The Impact of Transnational Advocacy on Environmental Policy Leadership” at the University of Michigan in Political Science and Public Policy. Professor Charles Shipan chaired the dissertation.
The committee was impressed by the dozens of outstanding dissertations nominated for the Lasswell Award. Dr. Lerner’s dissertation was particularly noteworthy, even within this distinguished field of nominated work. Lerner’s dissertation evaluates the role of transnational actors, including international NGOs and multinational corporations to influence policy adoption. The author applied network analysis and other tools to a novel dataset of environmental policy leadership. He showed that multinational corporations slow policy adoption in developed countries, while international NGOs catalyze policy adoption in developing countries.
This work could hardly be more timely or important. In showcasing the ways transnational advocates shape policy in differing institutional contexts, this dissertation provides an important contribution to the policy diffusion and adoption literatures, and to the environmental policy literature as well. We found the assembled data impressive in scope (185 countries over 70 years) and detail. This work will be used widely and built upon by policy scholars in the years ahead.
E.E. Schattschneider Award for the best dissertation in the field of American government
Recipient: Rachel Porter, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Title: “Some Politics Are Still Local: Strategic Position Taking in Congress & Elections”
Award Committee: Chair: Dr. Pamela C. Corley, Southern Methodist University; Davia C. Downey, University of Memphis; Dr. Daniel J. Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania
Award Citation: In “Some Politics Are Still Local: Strategic Position Taking in Congress & Elections,” Dr. Rachel Porter explores the kinds of electoral conditions under which congressional candidates might still choose to “go local.” She employs text data on policy positions extracted from campaign websites for candidates who ran for the US House of Representatives across the 2018 and 2020 elections. Pairing this original data collection with a variety of methods for quantitative text analysis, Dr. Porter shows that theories of strategic candidate behavior must be updated to better reflect what locally oriented campaigning looks like in today’s era of nationalized politics. More specifically, she finds that candidates are likely to adopt local issues into their campaign platforms when there is strong two-party competition in their election. Pleasing moderate and undecided voters is paramount in marginal districts, and these kinds of voters tend to prefer candidates who place local priorities ahead of party messaging. Additionally, Dr. Porter shows that candidates who have a history of legislating on local issues (i.e., members of Congress and state legislators) dedicate a statistically significantly greater proportion of their campaign platform to local topics. Finally, she demonstrates that candidates are less likely to run on local issues when their primary electorate skews ideologically extreme.
Additionally, Dr. Porter shows that politicians who employ locally-oriented rhetoric in their campaigns carry forward this same position taking behavior into the legislative arena. This finding underscores a critical, but under-emphasized, continuity between an incumbent’s electoral and legislative behavior. This dissertation refocuses the discipline’s attention in an era of nationalized expectations back towards local considerations, reminding scholars that local politics are still relevant in modern campaigns. We would like to commend Dr. Porter for the exceedingly high quality of her dissertation research.
Kenneth Sherrill Prize for the best dissertation proposal for an empirical study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) topics in political science
Recipient: Rachel O’Neal, University of Colorado Boulder
Title: “Hetero-cis-normativity”
Award Committee: Chair: Gabriele Magni, Loyola Marymount University; Dr. Logan S. Casey, Harvard University; Dr. Gregory B. Lewis, Georgia State University
Award Citation: Rachel O’Neal is the winner of the 2023 Kenneth Sherrill Prize, which recognizes the best doctoral dissertation proposal for an empirical study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender topics in political science. Rachel’s dissertation proposal sets out to explain the variation in queer and trans rights in comparative perspective and across the US. The project examines key topics in the context of queer rights, including the legality of gender maker changes, conversion therapy bans, and hetero-normative bias in court cases. Rachel’s work proposes a cyclical, rather than linear, understanding of queer rights developments, which accounts for the emergence of anti-LGBTQ+ efforts and legislation. The project explores an area of policy making that has received limited attention in the political science literature, and has the potential to make a significant impact on both academic scholarship and policy research. The committee was especially impressed by Rachel’s broad and ambitious project, which includes the collection of original datasets and the creation of a new index to measure hetero-cis-normativity.
Leo Strauss Award for the best dissertation in the field of political philosophy
Co-recipient: Sara Hassani, New School for Social Research
Title: “Cloistered Infernos: The Politics of Self-Immolation in the Persian Belt”
Co-recipient: Nazli Konya, Cornell University
Title: “The Inappropriable People of Gezi: Refusal, Protest, Desire”
Award Committee: Chair: Dr. Neil Roberts, University of Toronto; Nancy Luxon, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; Dr. Kyong-Min Son, University of Delaware
Award Citation: Dr. Sara Hassani’s “Cloistered Infernos: The Politics of Self-Immolation in the Persian Belt” is an extraordinary dissertation distinguished by its scope, originality, and insight. It investigates a disturbing phenomenon: startlingly high rates of self-immolation among young women in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Through rigorous historical research and painstakingly conducted interviews, “Cloistered Infernos” carefully contextualizes and reconstructs the experience of those women who are typically dismissed as irrational in the official discourse and largely neglected by Western scholars. The dissertation then distills compelling theoretical insights from this empirical analysis, illuminating the multidimensional operation of police power enacted on women’s bodies and the unconventional political agency they exercised under and against that police power. A stunning example of political theory from the ground up and outside the Western canon, Hassani’s “Cloistered Infernos” deepens our understanding of power, oppression, and resistance, and equally important, expands the possibilities of political theory.
Dr. Nazli Konya’s “The Inappropriable People of Gezi: Refusal, Protest, Desire” is an exceptionally sophisticated analysis of the 2013 Gezi protests in Turkey as an instance of direct political action. Two qualities distinguish this dissertation from others. First, the manuscript moves deftly between classic critical theoretical texts and Turkish political practices to argue that the Gezi protests exceed the reach of Western analytic frameworks. The dissertation thus performs a kind of pedagogy for the reader about how far these theoretical frameworks can travel beyond spaces easily sited in the Global North. Second, the project carefully teases apart the critique and “undoing” of one political order while also composing a new collective that seeks to organize and understand itself on different political, psychological, and social terms. A brilliantly crafted and executed project, this dissertation challenges political theory to abandon frameworks of popular sovereignty, fugitive democracy, or failed states when theorizing politics beyond the West. In this vein, Konya’s “The Inappropriable People of Gezi” contributes important new forms of protest and refusal, and so vivifies new collectives and their political agency.
Merze Tate Award for the best dissertation in the field of international relations, law, and politics
Recipient: D.G. Kim, University of California, San Diego
Title: “Anti-Asian Racism and the Racial Politics of US-China Great Power Rivalry”
Award Committee: Chair: Dr. Songying Fang, Rice University; Dr. John F Garofano, US Naval War College; Dr. Margaret E. Peters, University of California, Los Angeles
Award Citation: The dissertation “Anti-Asian Racism and the Racial Politics of US-China Great Power Rivalry” examines how anti-Asian racism in the US affects views on US foreign policy toward China and how it has a boomerang effect on Chinese foreign policy preferences toward the US The author has developed new measures of anti-Asian racial attitudes and implemented multiple original surveys and survey experiments in the US and China. The research reveals that anti-Asian sentiments in the US leads to/ correlates with more hawkish policies towards China, and that these views increase Chinese public support for both hardline policies towards the US and support for China’s political system. The novel theoretical and empirical approaches proposed by the dissertation to unpack the complex feedback loop between views on race, policy, and increased inter-state tensions can be applied to other contexts where race and international politics intertwine. Moreover, the research highlights yet another reason for policymakers to address domestic racism to decrease reflexive hawkishness in foreign relations.
Leonard D. White Award for the best dissertation in the field of public administration
Recipient: Kaylyn Jackson Schiff, Emory University
Title: “The Digital Citizen: The Impact of Technology on Public Participation and Government Responsiveness”
Award Committee: Chair: Dr. Dan Berliner, London School of Economics; Cullen Merritt, Indiana University; Dr. Eunju Rho, Northern Illinois University
Award Citation: The Leonard D. White Award Committee is happy to select Dr. Kaylyn Jackson Schiff’s “The Digital Citizen: The Impact of Technology on Public Participation and Government Responsiveness” as the 2023 award winner.
Dr. Schiff’s research tackles a topic of great contemporary importance, specifically focusing on citizen participation in the digital era. This subject holds substantial relevance given the increasing influence of digital technologies in today’s society. This dissertation addresses fundamental public administration questions at the intersection of public engagement, social equity, and technology that are of current value, but will also be of future value as technology continues to expand its role in policy design and implementation.
Kaylyn Jackson Schiff (right) receives her award next to Zachary Peskowitz (left).
The dissertation uses novel empirics and rigorous methods in theoretically well-grounded ways. It poses creative questions and develops novel ways to answer them with innovative uses of new data sources and multiple methodological approaches. Its key findings include that collaboration in service requests induces greater responsiveness by government officials, that non-governmental sources of performance information can lead to shifts in public behavior both in meetings and at the ballot box, and that politicians are more responsive to communications from perceived supporters, even as they are largely insensitive to the costliness of different forms of communication.
The dissertation’s approaches and findings have relevance for future research in public administration as well as across fields of political science, government communication, citizen relationships, co-production, and local government management. The practical implications that emerge from the dissertation can benefit local governments, policy-makers, public managers, and service recipients. Studies rarely offer valuable insights for the full range of actors within the policymaking cycle—fortunately, this dissertation is an exception in this regard. The dissertation is also very well-written, making it accessible to all readers.
Overall, we commend Dr. Schiff for her excellent research and congratulate her for winning the 2023 Leonard D. White Award.
Paper, Article, & Poster Awards
APSA Best Poster Award for the best poster presented by a graduate student and/or early career scholar at the APSA Annual Meeting
Recipient: Meiqing Zhang, University of Southern California
Title: “Moralized Social Media in the 2020 Presidential Election”
Award Committee: Chair: Katherine Haenschen, Northeastern University; Adriana Alfaro, Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico; Fernando Feitosa, McGill University; Erik Hanson, University of Southern California; Dr. Rachel Schoner, Tulane University
Meiqing Zhand receives her award.
Award Citation: Meiqing Zhang’s poster “Moralized Social Media in the 2020 Presidential Election” is the winner of the 2023 Best Poster Award recognizing work by an Early Career Scholar presented at APSA 2022. In her poster, Zhang reports the result of a large-scale computational content analysis to identify the use of moralizing language in Twitter discourse during the 2020 election. Her analysis of over 848 million Tweets finds that both Republicans and Democrats used moralizing language to connect the topics of voting by mail and election fraud, thus making the topic more salient in the broader political discourse. We applaud Zhang for her work.
Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award for the best paper presented at the previous year’s APSA Annual Meeting
Recipient: Shengqiao Lin, University of Texas at Austin
Title: “Addressing Risk by Doing Good: Business Responses to Policy Initiatives”
Award Committee: Chair: Erica Frantz, Michigan State University; Dr. Justin Kirkland, University of Virginia; Dr. Dan Reiter, Emory University
Award Citation: The committee is pleased to award the 2023 Franklin R. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award to Shengqiao Lin for “Addressing Risk by Doing Good: Business Responses to Policy Initiatives.” This paper stands out as the best paper presented at the 2022 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Montreal, Canada. Lin’s paper shows, perhaps surprisingly, that private firms operating in non-democratic contexts can be incentivized to invest in government initiatives to reduce poverty when their political risk is high.
Shengqiao Lin (right) receives his award next to his wife, Dongkun Liu (left).
The paper makes a wonderful contribution to our understanding of how private firms address political risk in environments with weak institutions. Where private firms have high political risks, politicians can incentivize them to spend money on policy goals that are important for their career advancement. In this way, we see private firms “doing good”—and investing in poverty reduction programs—as a means of minimizing the chance that they will face government regulation and fines.
To illustrate this, the paper looks at how private firms responded to China’s Targeted Poverty Alleviation campaign, begun in 2015. It measures firm-level political risk in an innovative way, using a text-as-data approach based on questions and answers between institutional investors and publicly traded firms in China. Using this data, it shows that as firm-level political risk increases, so too does expenditure on poverty reduction programs. It offers evidence, as well, that this strategy for addressing political risk is effective: firms allocating resources in this way are more likely to receive preferential treatment when they violate government regulations.
The paper is well-organized, thorough, and methodologically innovative. The findings to emerge suggest that government initiatives in non-democratic contexts that are societally beneficial—such as poverty reduction programs—can receive a boost in investments from an unexpected ally: private firms with high political risk.
Heinz I. Eulau Award for best article published in the American Political Science Review and Perspectives on Politics in the previous calendar year
Recipient (APSR): Agustina Paglayan, University of California, San Diego
Title: “Education or Indoctrination? The Violent Origins of Public School Systems in an Era of State-Building”
Recipients (POP): Jamilla Michener, Cornell University; Mallory SoRelle, Duke University; Chloe Thurston, Northwestern University
Title: “From the Margins to the Center: A Bottom-Up Approach to Welfare State Scholarship”
Award Committee: Chair: Dr. Jane R. Gingrich, University of Oxford; Dr. Kim Yi Dionne, University of California, Riverside; Dr. Paul S. Herrnson, University of Connecticut; Dr. Elizabeth Maggie Penn, Emory University; Dr. Peter Rutland, Wesleyan University
Award Citations: (APSR) “Education or Indoctrination? The Violent Origins of Public School Systems in an Era of State-Building ’’ is a path-breaking article that locates the origins of mass education systems in the conflictual process of state building. Paglayan builds on a research agenda, which she developed in earlier work, locating the origins of educational expansion in the pre-democratic political context. This paper substantially advances our theories about the politics of educational expansion by reconceptualizing its purpose. Paglayan argues that state actors saw educational expansion not primarily as a distributive good or a source of human capital development, but as a form of indoctrination that had the potential to strengthen social control. This perspective on education yields a series of new hypotheses about the timing of expansion and the siting of educational institutions, that break with classic political economy approaches that had focused on local systems of production or electoral institutions.
The paper combines these theoretical claims with two original historical datasets, one cross-national dataset on mass primary school expansion and a second detailed dataset on the geographic structure of expansion in Chile. Paglayan shows that, in the wake of civil wars, leaders invested in education. Through the Chilean case, she argues that the government deliberately sited educational institutions in areas of rebel dominance as a tool to create more political order. The paper is notable for its clear and careful theorization alongside its creative use of original data. The paper provides important new resources to scholars asking critical questions about the nature of public goods provision and political order, through careful engagement with, and production of, historical data. In sum, the paper provides crucial insights into the origins of mass education systems and spurs on an important new research agenda.
(POP) “From the Margins to the Center: A Bottom-Up Approach to Welfare State Scholarship” is an important and agenda-setting article on the study of American political economy, which develops a range of theoretical tools to enable a bottom-up research approach. Michener, SoRelle and Thurston argue that much of the theoretical and empirical research on the welfare state focuses on questions of policy design from the perspective of policy-makers and elite actors. This work has yielded critical insights but also leaves blind spots in our understanding of how institutions operate. Instead, they ask, what would a genuinely bottom-up approach constitute, one that centers those who are the most excluded and vulnerable, look like.
Throughout the article, they develop a range of conceptual tools to enable this type of research, demonstrating that centering those at the societal margins leads to reconceptualizing the boundaries, logic, and structure of what constitutes the welfare state. Drawing on research on housing, civil legal assistance, and more traditional welfare programs, and their intersection with race, class, and other forms of disadvantage, they show that areas long separated from studies of welfare—systems of law, credit, and housing regulation—emerge as central when we examine social policy from a bottom-up perspective. In so doing, this article makes a critical normative claim, that taking the experiences, voices and perspectives of groups most often conceptualized as the objects of policy seriously, is central to studying it. We have selected this article for the Eulau award both because it is profoundly generative of new research questions and provides a novel and insightful set of theoretical tools to approach them.
Journal of Political Science Education Best Article Award, sponsored by Taylor & Francis
Recipient: Loan K. Le
Title: “Freedom of Information in the Classroom: Teaching for Empowerment in the Social Sciences and in Ethnic Studies”, Vol 18, Issue 2, Special Issue: Teaching College Students about Asian Pacific American Politics from Multiple Perspective
Award Committee: Patrick Bijsmans, Maastricht University; Michelle D. Deardorff, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC); Mary McHugh, Merrimack College
Book Awards
Merze Tate – Elinor Ostrom Outstanding Book Award for the best book on government, politics, or international affairs
Recipient: Jacob Grumbach, University of Washington
Title: Laboratories against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics (Princeton University Press)
Award Committee: Chair: Dr. Jennifer Pribble, University of Richmond; Dr. Leonardo Baccini, McGill University; Jose Antonio Cheibub, University of Pittsburgh; Dr. Murad Idris, University of Michigan; Dr. Deondra Rose, Duke University
Award Citation: In Laboratories against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics, Jacob Grumbach makes a powerful contribution to our understanding of the role that federalism plays in shaping American democracy. Specifically, Grumbach finds that as US politics grew increasingly gridlocked at the national level, due to polarization and divided government, partisan and activist groups shifted policy-making efforts to state-level government. This resurgence of local governance generated wide subnational variation on a range of issues, including reproductive rights, healthcare, gun control, and the environment, among others. Grumbach’s book also details the ways that partisan and activist groups have used state-level government to suppress the vote, gerrymander congressional districts, and ultimately erode American democracy. The committee was impressed with Grumbach’s careful and thorough analysis, intellectual openness, and creativity. The book draws on insights generated from debates across methodological and historical lines, both recognizing and building on work from multiple subfields of political science. Furthermore, just as it is capacious in its disciplinary engagements, the book’s arguments and implications speak to numerous scholarly constituencies across the discipline, exploring the timely and pressing question of what explains democratic backsliding in the United States.
Ralph J. Bunche Award for the best scholarly work in political science that explores the phenomenon of ethnic and cultural pluralism
Recipient: Sally A. Nuamah, Northwestern University
Title: Closed for Democracy: How Mass School Closure Undermines the Citizenship of Black Americans (Cambridge University Press)
Award Committee: Chair: Dr. Catherine E. De Vries, Bocconi University; Dr. Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, George Mason University; Dr. James A. McCann, Purdue University
Award Citation: In a systematic and persuasive analysis, Nuamah traces the impact of public school closures on civic life within Black communities in major urban centers. The book offers a variety of qualitative and quantitative evidence to show that mobilization to support of local schools can leave activists feeling fatigued when their efforts are met with a lack of democratic transparency and responsiveness—an effect the author refers to as “collective participatory debt.” Closed for Democracy engages with very important questions concerning equity in public services and community wellbeing in ways that is accessible and informative not only for scholars and practitioners, but also the wider public. The book is timely and very well researched and therefore a very worthy recipient of the 2023 Ralph J. Bunche award.
Robert A. Dahl Award for an untenured scholar who has produced scholarship of the highest quality on democracy
Recipient: Aram Hur, University of Missouri
Title: Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia (Cornell University Press)
Award Committee: Chair: Ruth Dassonneville, Universite de Montreal; Dr. Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Stanford University; Dr. Cynthia McClintock, George Washington University
Award Citation: Aram Hur’s Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia is an impressive, theoretically rich and empirically strong contribution to the field of comparative politics. The book seeks to answer the question: why do some citizens feel it is their responsibility to vote, to pay taxes or to do military service while others do not? Studying this question in East Asia, in particular a comparison between South Korea and Taiwan, Hur makes the argument that civic duty is grounded in a sense of obligation to the community, implying civic duty is rooted in nationalism. In making this argument, Hur asserts that nationalism is not inherently opposed to democracy. Instead, the impact of nationalism on democracy depends on the historical connection between a nation and its democratic governance. If national narratives depict this connection as a mutual commitment, nationalism can enhance democracies by inspiring a sense of civic responsibility among the populace. The empirical analyses that support this argument rely on an impressively broad range of methods and approaches, including analyses of personal narratives of young citizens, large N-survey analyses and original survey experiments. Hur’s Narratives of Civic Duty makes two important contributions to the comparative politics literature. First, Hur draws attention to the importance of civic duty for democratic governance—in this way giving a central place to an attitude that we still know little about. Second, examining non-Western countries where democracy has historically been weak, she shows that nationalism can have favorable effects on democracy—challenging the conventional wisdom.
Aram Hur (center) receives her award next to her husband and son.
Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the best book published during the previous calendar year in the field of United States national policy
Recipient: R. Douglas Arnold, Princeton University
Title: Fixing Social Security: The Politics of Reform in a Polarized Age (Princeton University Press)
Award Committee: Chair: Dr. Lesley Lavery, Macalester College; Dr. Devin Caughey, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Dr. Eduardo J. Gomez, Lehigh University
Award Citation: In Fixing Social Security: The Politics of Reform in a Polarized Age, R. Douglas Arnold explores Congress’s inaction on impending Social Security insolvency over the past three decades. Arnold chronicles past reform episodes, describes the nature of the current challenge, illuminates the goals and incentives of relevant actors, and boldly lays out the potential routes to reform.
With lucid prose and compelling logic, Arnold provides a masterclass of the application of theory to practical problem-solving, Fixing Social Security exemplifies the best of what political science has to offer to policy analysis. It is the rare book that offers as much to scholars as it does to practitioners, and we recommend it to all interested in the intersection of politics and policy-making.
Benjamin E. Lippincott Award for exceptional work by a living political theorist that is still considered significant after a time span of at least 15 years since the original publication
Recipient: Joan Tronto, University of Minnesota
Title: Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (Routledge)
Award Committee: Chair: Ayelet Shachar, University of California, Berkeley; Dr. Carol C. Gould, City University of New York; Dr. Alexander H. Gourevitch, Brown University
Award Citation: Joan Tronto’s Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care is a paradigm-setting book. Tronto argues that we need to rewrite the boundaries and orientation of political theory by incorporating an ethic of care. She does not reject the importance of theories of justice, right and duty, but argues that our political thinking and acting is dramatically incomplete if it fails to grasp the importance of care. A full political community cannot just comprise individuals who claim and redeem their rights, but who also care for each others’ needs. We have failed to grasp the importance of care because we have privatized it. It appears to be relevant only to the personal sphere of intimate relations and therefore non-political. Tronto convincingly shows that these boundaries are artificial, themselves political, and should be broken down so that care can be part of our political life, institutionally and ethically. She further provides the conceptual architecture for redrawing the boundaries of political morality. A political community must know the importance of distinguishing between caring about, taking care of, care-giving and care-receiving, and its caring-citizens must possess the relevant virtues, such as attentiveness, responsiveness, and competence.
While we have finally, over the past few decades, found care-talk more natural in our political philosophy, it is in no small measure because of Tronto’s path-breaking work. It set the agenda for research across various subfields in political theory. For instance, it was well ahead of its time in reading the Scottish sentimentalists as a challenge to the abstract rationalism of the Kantian tradition. It set the agenda for decades of contemporary feminist scholarship on care, domestic labor, and social reproduction. It is a rare cross-over source for both analytic philosophical and critical theoretic approaches to the family. And it has reached out beyond political philosophy to other disciplines like gender studies, sociology, and law. No less significant, the care perspective to which Tronto’s book was a seminal contribution has found resonance in the public sphere and even in public policy with the new emphasis on the “care economy” and the need to evaluate how policies impact the possibilities of caring social relations. Indeed, Tronto and others influenced by her important work have recently gone on to develop the implications of such a care approach for our understanding of democracy itself. Above all, Moral Boundaries remains fresh and engaging, as all classic works should.
APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award for the best first book in any field of political science, showing promise of having substantive impact on the overall discipline
Recipient: Fiona Shen-Bayh, The College of William and Mary
Title: Undue Process: Persecution and Punishment in Autocratic Courts (Cambridge University Press)
Award Committee: Chair: Dr. Hasret Dikici Bilgin, Istanbul Bilgi University; Dr. Irasema Coronado, Arizona State University; Dr. Florian Foos, London School of Economics and Political Science; Dr. Henk Erich Goemans, University of Rochester; Professor Yue Zhang, University of Illinois - Chicago
Award Citation: The committee unanimously selected Professor Shen-Bayh’s book, entitled Undue Process: Persecution and Punishment in Autocratic Courts. This important work on autocratic courts in sub-Saharan Africa during the post-independence era looks at how and why autocrats choose to punish opponents through the judicial process, and the circumstances under which they resort to extra-judicial means. Shen-Bayh presents a theory of judicial repression centered around the political trial. She argues that autocrats use courts to consolidate power, stifle dissent, repress political opponents, institutionalize punishment, and undermine the rule of law. Autocrats pack the court with regime loyalists to ensure their cooperation.
The book’s key insight, as it relates to autocratic systems, is that putting opponents on trial serves to demonstrate the regime’s power and the fruitlessness of opposition. Opponents, when put on trial, will always lose their case, and sometimes their lives. Shen-Bayh brings a wealth of original qualitative and quantitative data from archival sources to bear on her question and provides illuminating case studies. Her cases are well-researched, and her theory is general enough to be applied to different world regions and periods. Her work constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of the role of courts in African politics, authoritarian regimes, and political control.
Victoria Schuck Award for the best book published on women and politics
Recipient: Ke Li, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York
Title: Marriage Unbound: State Law, Power, and Inequality in Contemporary China (Stanford University Press)
Award Committee: Chair: Deborah Jordan Brooks, Dartmouth College; Peace A. Medie, University of Ghana; Dr. Rebecca Sanders, University of Cincinnati
Award Citation: Ke Li’s book, Marriage Unbound: State Law, Power, and Inequality in Contemporary China, elegantly untangles the many layers of political and legal bureaucracy faced by Chinese women as they seek to navigate what many would consider to be a deeply personal decision: divorce. Using ethnographic and archival analysis, along with countless hours spent in Chinese courtroom proceedings and in interviews with those involved in different layers of a legal system that tends to make divorces in China painstakingly fraught to obtain, Li reveals how the state can reach deeply into some of the most intimate aspects of women’s lives, greatly limiting their personal freedom and economic power in process. Throughout the work, the author demonstrates that the dynamics of divorce proceedings shed light on how law and legalism operate in an autocratic political environment. Beautifully written, Marriage Unbound not only illuminates political and legal complexities in a level of detail that will become a touchstone for specialists who do work on this topic, it also provides the non-specialist reader with a fascinating window into the individual struggles of women living within political and legal frameworks developed largely by, and for, men.
Ke Li receives her award.
Career Awards
APSA Community College Faculty Award for excellence in teaching, mentoring, community engagement, governance, and/or research by a community college faculty member in the profession
Recipient: Anne Gillman, American River College
Award Committee: Chair: Dr. Elsa Dias, Pikes Peak Community College; Dr. LaTasha Chaffin DeHaan, Elgin Community College; Dr. Stephanie A Hallock, Harford Community College
Award Citation: Anne Gillman, PhD dedicates her time to teaching and to researching models of applied civic engagement in American River College (ARC), California. She teaches political science courses and focuses on how to bring politics to students in real time. Anne’s work has taken her from Washington DC to Ecuador, Brazil, and Guatemala. She transfers her legislative knowledge from Washington, DC to her American Government students at ARC. Her knowledge of citizen revolutions and grassroots movements in Latin America influences her perspective on civic engagement and citizen activism.
Anne Gillman holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins University. Anne is an active scholar with numerous publications that demonstrate her contributions to not only to the discipline of political science in general, but also to the fields of comparative and American politics. Furthermore, her publications make connections between the active researcher and the individual practitioners on the ground. Anne also demonstrates broad academic interests. Her various conference participations allude to interests that are not only important for the discipline but to her students as well as beneficiaries of her commitment to research and knowledge.
One of Anne’s more unique contributions is the work she is developing on pedagogy. This model was presented at the 2023 TLC. The model focuses on the epistemology of knowledge “how we know what we know.” One of the components of this model is the pragmatic doing of democracy. For community college students, this is like a light bulb. The digital aspect of this model is not only appealing to a new generation of students, but it also bridges the diversity of community college students, because it provides for a conduit to understanding and generating knowledge about political science and democracy. This work is not only being used in Anne’s classes, but also in the Department of Political Science, and more broadly in other disciplines at ARC.
Anne cultivates a disciplinary approach in her teaching that considers the diversity of her students and their respective needs in her teaching. Her commitment to civic engagement and the connection between students’ lives and the classroom are demonstrated by her recognition of students’ needs in a post-pandemic era and its particular effects on disproportionately impacted populations. She starts her classes with community building exercises and provides a safe space for students to engage with each other and with the curriculum.
Anne has established a tradition of epistemology in the teaching of politics and its connection to democratic principles, and political science while balancing the uniqueness of her students, and their distinctive needs. She is also a committed practitioner of political science research and innovation. The applied civic engagement and student focused teaching are elements that Anne delivers to her students, and thus, creating meaningful learning opportunities for students at ARC.
APSA Distinguished Award for Civic and Community Engagement for significant civic or community engagement activity by a political scientist which merges knowledge and practice and has an impact outside of the profession or the academy
Recipient: Rebecca Glazier, University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Award Committee: Chair: Dr. Elizabeth C. Matto, Rutgers University, New Brunswick; Dr. Karen M. Kedrowski, Iowa State University; Dr. Leah A. Murray, Weber State University; Dr. Malliga Och, Denison University; Dr. Austin Trantham, Saint Leo University
Award Citation: A longitudinal project of ten years, Dr. Glazier’s Little Rock Congregations Study exemplifies how a political science scholarship can improve civic life in partnership with community partners. Situated in Little Rock, Arkansas, the LRCS is a long-term community-based research effort that examines the impact of religion on politics and community life. Beginning in 2012 with five participating congregations and approximately 450 member-respondents and growing to 35 participating congregations and more than 2,200 member-respondents currently, the LRCS studies the needs and interests of research participants by collecting a diverse set of qualitative and quantitative data. Throughout, Dr. Glazier intentionally involves congregations as partners, and her research returns valuable information to them through reports, infographics, congregation spotlights, and community programming. In more recent years, the LRCS has focused on faith-based racial justice, a particularly important topic in a racially-divided city. Congregations have used the findings and programming of the LRCS to prioritize racial justice work, set goals for their congregations, and do the community engagement work that they find most meaningful.
The rigorous mixed method research design has produced high quality scholarship with results shared in several peer-reviewed academic publications. The LRCS also is reflective of a true collaboration between Dr. Glazier and a diverse group of congregations and clergy members. Indeed, the Clergy Advisory Board with whom Dr. Glazier partners provides input on research questions, outreach, and survey design; hold community events to share results and get feedback from faith leaders; and regularly produce and share reports with findings of interest to the community. These actions demonstrate good community engagement practices through research and also enable the participating congregations to take action themselves. Rebecca Glazier’s work through the Little Rock Congregations Study enhances our understanding of the importance of faith and of religious communities for both civic and community engagement, serves as an exemplar for a community-engaged research project, and is highly deserving of this recognition.
APSA Distinguished Teaching Award for outstanding contributions to undergraduate and graduate teaching political science at two- or four-year institutions
Recipient: M. Brielle Harbin, United States Naval Academy
Award Committee: Chair: Dr. Shamira M. Gelbman, Wabash College; Dr. Judithanne Scourfield McLauchlan, University of South Florida; Dr. Everett Albert Vieira, III, California State University, Fresno
Award Citation: In the span of under a decade, Dr. M. Brielle Harbin has established an impressive track record in promoting equity and inclusion both within and well beyond her own classroom. Dr. Harbin’s leadership in this arena began when she was a graduate student at Vanderbilt University. During that time, she co-organized learning communities on teaching, power, and difference and gender identity/expression; created a workshop series for women graduate students to reflect on how gender shapes their experience in academe; and established professionalization workshops for Black graduate students. Dr. Harbin has continued this important work as a faculty member at the United States Naval Academy, where she has been an assistant professor since 2019. Her own courses have featured both curricular and pedagogical innovation, as she introduced a new course on race, gender, class, and sexuality in US politics to the Naval Academy’s political science offerings. She also developed new instructional approaches and techniques to encourage students’ engagement with diversity and inclusion issues and foster a sense of belonging and community in her classes. Beyond her own courses, Dr. Harbin led a workshop on inclusive remote teaching for Naval Academy faculty learning during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and has since facilitated anti-racist pedagogy workshops at several other colleges and universities.
The impact of these initiatives is far-reaching. The curriculum Dr. Harbin developed for the women graduate students workshop series some eight years ago lives on in the Women in the Academy speaker series at Vanderbilt’s Margaret Cuninggim Women’s Center. The learning communities she organized have resulted in a published teaching guide, “Teaching Beyond the Gender Binary in the University Classroom,” and two co-authored journal articles, including the award-winning “Teaching Race and Racial Justice: Developing Students’ Cognitive and Affective Understanding of Race” in the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning journal, Teaching & Learning Inquiry. And Dr. Harbin’s own classroom interventions have yielded solo-authored publications in College Teaching and PS: Political Science & Politics.
Though still early career, Dr. Harbin has distinguished herself as a diversity, equity, and inclusion leader in political science and higher education more broadly. For this reason, the committee is pleased to select her as the 2023 recipient of the APSA Distinguished Teaching Award.
John Gaus Award for a career of exemplary scholarship in the joint tradition of political science and public administration
Recipient: Daniel Carpenter, Harvard University
Award Committee: Chair: Dr. Carla M. Flink, American University; Dr. John Brehm, University of Chicago; Dr. Daniel E. Chand, Kent State University
Award Citation: The Committee recognizes Professor Daniel Carpenter, Allie S. Freed Professor of Government and Chair of the Department of Government in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University as the recipient of the 2023 John Gaus Award.
Professor Carpenter’s scholarship on public bureaucracy and regulations has made substantial contributions to the joint tradition of political science and public administration. He has published in top outlets and amassed more than 11,700 citations on Google Scholar. Theoretically, his work extends beyond the political science and institutional politics understanding of bureaucracy to incorporate context and development of administrative reputations to explain agency operations and performance. His body of work is known for creatively engaging numerous methods from historical archival work to advance statistical modeling. His scholarship has become foundational readings for students in political science and public administration. As a testament to his contributions, his nominators state “Professor Carpenter is the most important scholar of his generation in the study of public administration, and the most important figure in the field during the past quarter century.”
Professor Carpenter’s work has been recognized with numerous awards including The Allan Sharlin Memorial Award of the Social Science History Association for his book Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA (Princeton, 2010) and both the Gladys Kammerer Prize of the American Political Science Association and the Charles Levine Prize of the International Political Science Association for The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862-1928. His career accomplishments have been recognized with the Herbert A. Simon Award for Career Scholarly Contributions to the Scientific Study of Bureaucracy (2011, Midwest Political Science Association) and by being an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.
Frank J. Goodnow Award for service to the community of political science by teachers, researchers, and public servants who work in the many fields of politics
Recipient: Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Ohio State University
Award Committee: Chair: Dr. Vladimir Kogan, Ohio State University; Danielle Lupton, Colgate University; Dr. Chapman Rackaway, Radford University
Award Citation: Professor Box-Steffensmeier, a recent APSA president, is widely known for her path-breaking work in political methodology and substantive contributions to the literature on American politics. In addition to her incredible scholarship, Professor Box-Steffensmeier has also been instrumental in increasing the diversity and pipeline in this area by creating the Visions in Methodology (VIM) workshop program. As one committee member noted, “VIM has been an incredible accomplishment, in and of itself, which has worked to support countless women in feeling that they have a place in the subfield.”
In addition to her service to APSA, Professor Box-Steffensmeier also served as a past president of the Midwest Political Science Association and the first female president of the Society for Political Methodology. As part of this work, Professor Box-Steffensmeier also secured funding from the National Science Foundation for an initiative to mentor high school teachers in statistics instruction.
Janet Box-Steffensmeier (center) receives her award next to Sara Mitchell (right) and Soohyun Cho (left).
It is difficult to provide a succinct summary of Professor Box-Steffensmeier’s voluminous contributions to the development and dissemination of statistical methods, substantive research, mentorship, and service within her home university and the broader scholarly community. But it is clear she has been a tireless advocate for the discipline through her various leadership roles and institution-building activities.
Hubert H. Humphrey Award for notable public service by a political scientist
Recipient: Victor Cha, Georgetown University
Award Committee: Dr. Matthew A. Baum, Harvard University; Amanda Hollis-Brusky, Pomona College; Dr. Reyko Huang, Texas A&M University; Dr. Bryan D. Jones, University of Texas, Austin; Dr. Alexander Thompson, Ohio State University
Award Citation: The committee is pleased to award this year’s Hubert H. Humphrey Award to political scientist Victor Cha. Dr. Cha is Vice Dean and D.S. Song-KF Endowed Chair in the School of Foreign Service and Department of Government at Georgetown University, as well as a Senior Adviser for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC He also serves in the Biden administration as a member of the Defense Policy Board and formerly served on the National Security Council.
Dr. Cha studies international relations and international security in the Indo-Pacific region with a focus on the Korean peninsula. He is the award-winning author of seven books and over 60 articles on US-Asia relations in outlets like Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Washington Post, and New York Times. In addition to his service on the Defense Policy Board, a second stream of Dr. Cha’s work has focused on human rights and democracy in US foreign policy. As a Senior Fellow in Human Freedom at the George W. Bush Institute (GWBI), he helped in 2017 to conceive and create a scholarship fund with GWBI and the Communities Foundation of Texas for North Korean defectors to attend college and graduate school. As Director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council from 2004 to 2007, he was responsible for all relationships with US allies in Asia. In that capacity, he served as White House representative to the Six-Party talks and as US Deputy Head of Delegation, where he negotiated two denuclearization agreements with North Korea in 2005 and 2007, supported the conclusion of free trade agreements in 2005, pressed for North Korean human rights, helped to construct multilateral humanitarian disaster response and relief institutions in response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, worked on base realignment agreements in Korea and Japan and negotiated the return of remains of US soldiers from the Korean War.
In 2017, Dr. Cha was nominated by the Trump administration to serve as US ambassador to the Republic of Korea. However, Cha’s nomination was withdrawn when he publicly, in a Washington Post op-ed, opposed the Trump administration for considering the use of military force against North Korea, out of concern that such a policy could escalate into a major, even nuclear, war. Cha’s willingness to stand publicly against the administration arguably played a role in Trump’s pivot from military options to diplomacy the following year.
APSA-PSA International Partnerships Award for political scientists engaged in collaborative and productive cross-national partnerships that make a significant contribution to the discipline in the areas of teaching, research, or civic engagement
Recipients: Dr. Judithanne Scourfield McLauchlan, University of South Florida; Larisa Patlis, Free University of Moldova
Award Committee: Professor Christina Schneider, University of California; Professor Amelia Hadfield, the University of Surrey
Award Citation: We commend the winners of this year’s PSA/APSA International Partnerships Award for their commitment to building collaborative cross-national partnerships. The Global Classroom created by Dr. McLauchlan and Ms. Patlis is a unique virtual learning partnership that offered undergraduate students from USA and Moldova an opportunity to collaborate on joint research projects while gaining exposure to cultural exchange. Although the war in Ukraine added unexpected challenges to the course it also provided context for the importance of comparative research and international partnerships. The Comparative Legal Research Assignment which McLauchlan and Patlis developed for the course can now be adapted to other Global Classrooms. Their experience exemplifies the contributions to political science research and teaching that can be made through collaborative cross-national partnerships.
James Madison Award for an American political scientist who has made a distinguished scholarly contribution to political science
Recipient: Theda Skocpol, Harvard University
Award Committee: Chair: Dr. Susan D. Hyde, University of California, Berkeley; Professor Richard F. Bensel, Cornell University; Dr. Macartan Humphreys, the WZB
Award Citation: The committee unanimously and enthusiastically nominates Theda Skocpol as the recipient of the 2023 James Madison Award. Skocpol is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University where she both received her PhD in 1975 and has served on the faculty for most of her career. Skocpol originally garnered widespread recognition for her groundbreaking work in comparative historical sociology, including her first book States and Social Revolutions. Since then, has made foundational contributions in our understanding of the interaction between institutions and interests, and has tackled essential questions related to strengthening democracy, civil society, and social policy. Working at the intersection of the disciplines of sociology and political science, her historical-institutional research has had an impact upon all of the subfields of political science, especially within American politics and comparative politics. More recently she co-founded and directs the Scholars Strategy Network (SSN), which facilitates productive non-partisan engagement by scholars in public policy and public discourse. Already widely recognized for her contributions to the discipline, including with the 2007 Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, we are happy to add Theda Skocpol to this list of distinguished scholars. Her remarkable CV includes 12 books, 12 edited collections, and more than seven dozen articles.
Carey McWilliams Award for a major journalistic contribution to our understanding of politics
Recipient: Steve Lopez, Los Angeles Times
Award Committee: Chair: Dr. Bethany Albertson, University of Texas, Austin; Babak Bahador, George Washington University; Annelise Russell, University of Kentucky
Award Citation: We are pleased to present the 2023 Carey McWilliams Award to Steve Lopez, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times since 2001 and a four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary. His nomination letter notes that he “is a model of a regionally rooted journalist whose work, like that of McWilliams, speaks to and about broader national and international debates” and the committee agreed. Amid a decline of local news, Lopez’s work highlights the power of reporting on local, unique communities and the power of that contribution to shed light on inequality, regional disparities, and public policy problems in our own neighborhoods. From his work on homelessness in Los Angeles County, the effects of income inequality, the challenges facing Spanish-speaking immigrants, to his more recent work on aging, Lopez’s writing demonstrates his talent for listening to those at the margins and giving them voice. Beyond his work as a columnist, Lopez is the author of multiple books, including The Soloist, which won the PEN USA Literary Award for Non-Fiction, and most recently, Independence Day.
Charles E. Merriam Award in recognition of a person whose published work and career represent a significant contribution to the art of government through the application of social science research
Recipient: Michael C. Dawson, University of Chicago
Award Committee: Chair: Dr. Fonna Forman, University of California, San Diego; Dr. Rogan Kersh, Wake Forest University; Joel Rast, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Award Citation: We are delighted to announce that Professor Michael Dawson has received the 2023 Charles E. Merriam Award from APSA. Professor Dawson is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Professor Dawson’s path-breaking research includes signal analyses of the US government. His multiple award-winning work Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (Princeton University Press, 1995) and a related collection of articles, utilize election and survey data to demonstrate African Americans’ ongoing political disenfranchisement and resulting collective disillusionment with state institutions and US society more generally. Subsequent books and articles explored the role of radical black leftist politics in shaping the US government and the intersections of race and American civil society. As co-founder and longtime editor of the DuBois Review, Professor Dawson has also vitally helped expand social science contributions to understanding the intricate interplay of race and governance, in both the US and comparative government contexts.
Barbara Sinclair Lecture for achievement in promoting the understanding of the United States Congress and legislative politics
Recipient: Steven S. Smith, Washington University in St. Louis
Award Committee: Chair: Dr. David C. Barker, American University; Chair: Meghan McConaughey, American Political Science Association; Dr. Cliff Carrubba, Emory University; Dr. Kris Miler, University of Maryland, College Park; Dr. Jessica Robinson Preece, Brigham Young University
Award Citation: Professor Steven S. Smith is this year’s selection for the Barbara Sinclair Lecture, given to a preeminent scholar who promotes the understanding of the US Congress and legislative politics. The selection committee noted that Professor Smith has done this in a wide variety of ways. He is one of the most prominent scholars of political institutions of the past 50 years, having authored 13 books and over 80 articles and book chapters. He has been a principal investigator on 10 grants from the National Science Foundation, received numerous research and teaching awards, and served on several editorial boards. He is the Kate M. Gregg Distinguished Professor of Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Washington University. He was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and taught at George Washington University, Northwestern University, and the University of Minnesota, where he was the Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Political Science and Law. He was director of the Weidenbaum Center for 20 years. He received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1980, and his Bachelor of Arts degree from St. Cloud State University in 1975.
While many other Congress scholars of his generation have focused on the role and impact (or lack thereof) of parties, Smith’s research has shown the power of specific institutional procedures (e.g. the filibuster, special rules, judicial review, and more) on the policymaking process. While his early work focused more on the House, he has also worked extensively on the causes and consequences of procedural arrangements in the Senate. The focus on rules and procedure has allowed Professor Smith to make an impact on literature in electoral politics, party politics, political communication, and legislative politics outside the US system. Smith has written several textbooks and has been affiliated with Brookings for years, reflecting his strength in communicating scholarly research to broader audiences. He’s even contributed to several children’s books!
Finally, any discussion of Steve Smith’s impact would be remiss without mention of his former PhD students throughout the academy. He’s at the top of his generation in terms of training students who go on to successful careers as academics themselves.
Hanes Walton Jr. Award for a political scientist whose lifetime of distinguished scholarship has made significant contributions to our understanding of racial and ethnic politics and illuminates the conditions under which diversity and intergroup tolerance thrive in democratic societies.
Recipient: Vincent Hutchings, University of Michigan
Award Committee: Chair: Dr. Vesla Mae Weaver, Johns Hopkins University; Dr. Sekou Franklin, Middle Tennessee State University; Dr. Gladys Mitchell-Walthour, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Award Citation: Vincent Hutchings has had a tremendous influence on the field of political science, and his contributions have made a lasting mark on the study of racial and ethnic politics and public opinion as well as the professional trajectories of his students. Hutchings has accomplished this through his own pioneering scholarship and theoretical innovations around racial prejudice and political psychology and attitudes, but also by building up the key infrastructures to support these advances. For example, his longstanding commitment to develop our ability to examine political life is seen through his contributions as Principal Investigator of the longest running time series survey data collection, the American National Election Studies, from 2010 to 2017 as well as his leading several efforts to establish better samples within minoritized communities like the National Study of Ethnic Pluralism and Politics. He is a faithful member of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, and he did an exemplary job as president of the Midwest Political Science Association.
Professor Hutchings’ many leading articles as well as his book, Public Opinion and Democratic Accountability, have yielded important discoveries and advanced our understanding and examination of group politics and attitudes, the political significance of (and measurement of) racial prejudice, democratic accountability, public knowledge, political communication and cues, and racial policy preferences. They have become mainstays on syllabi and in classrooms.
Professor Hutchings has developed several cohorts of scholars through his steadfast mentorship of students who are now major leaders of public opinion, inequality, racial politics in their own right: including Ismail White, Tasha Philpot, Antoine Banks, Spencer Piston, Ashley Jardina, LaFleur Stephens, Nicole Yadon, Hakeem Jefferson, as well as dozens of others, even at the undergraduate level (including Lauren Davenport). Professor Hutchings was described as a tireless and generous advisor, whose training of students was patterned on collaboration and involvement in all aspects of the research process.
Professor Hutchings has continued to shape and expand our discipline through his leadership, scholarship, mentorship, and service. In recognition of his creating an environment for the flourishing of racial politics research, survey data collection, and examination of issues at the heart of democratic and racial politics, Hutchings is exceedingly deserving of the 2023 Hanes Walton, Jr. Career award. ■
