Career Awards

FRANK J. GOODNOW AWARD

The Goodnow Award recognizes distinguished service to the profession and the Association, by necessarily a career of scholarship. This service may be by individuals, groups, and public and private organizations who have played a role in the development of the political science profession and the building of the American Political Science Association.

Award Committee: Susan Tolleson-Rinehart, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Tony Affigne, Providence College; and Martha Joynt-Kumar, Towson State University

Recipient: Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, Cornell University

Citation: Mary Katzenstein’s career, combining the highest caliber of scholarship and the strongest commitment to public service, thoroughly exemplifies the spirit of the Goodnow award. Her 19 nominators from all over the US, the United Kingdom, and Australia, wrote evocatively of one of her most notable contributions: her creation of the Cornell Prison Education Program and Felon Rights. Of this extraordinary work, through which Katzenstein puts her knowledge and experience at the service of convicted felons who seek education, Mary has said this:

Part of my career has been aimed at demonstrating (post tenure!) that “engaged learning” can play a significant role in the construction of political science as a discipline … and to service to the “profession” broadly construed. … I have tried to ‘demonstrate’ that it is possible as a scholar … to work to disseminate the study of politics and other disciplines outside a narrow definition of the academy. …[W]hat has been most gratifying about this work is to be able to demonstrate that it is possible to establish an educational program, to find funding (the program began on a shoe string and now raises about $200,000 a year), and to involve large numbers of both Cornell students and “prison” students in an ambitious degree program.

Her integration of this exceptional public service with her scholarship has been recognized in recent years by the APSA’s Heinz I. Eulau Award Committee, who gave her and her colleagues the Eulau Award for the best article published in Perspectives on Politics in 2011…just one example of her commitment to representing the finest aspirations of our discipline by using rigorous scholarship to benefit the commonweal and the most vulnerable citizens among us.

Recipient: Minion Kenneth Chauncey “KC” Morrison, Mississippi State University

Citation: “KC” Morrison has honored our discipline by the scholarship in African American studies and the politics of race he has disseminated in books, journal articles, films, and even exhibition catalogues. His nominators from among his former colleagues in the University of Missouri system, current colleagues at Mississippi State University, as well as former students, note that an even greater contribution as an “ambassador for the discipline” is his wide-ranging, tireless mentorship of students.

Whether he was taking Missouri students to the Unviersity of Ghana or teaching Ghanaian students in Africa, being the kind of administrator who worked to create institutions to serve students well, mentor doctoral students, or steadfastly motivating undergraduate students to pursue careers in political science, Morrison has been the kind of professional for whom the Goodnow Award was created.

Some of his career recognitions—including the University of Missouri Faculty Alumni Award, a Diversity Enhancement Award, a Martin Luther King Community Award from Columbia, Missouri, and a Barbara Jordan Leadership Award from the Big Eight Conference—identify his contributions to broadening and deepening our understanding of race and politics through scholarship, teaching, mentorship, and public service. Morrison has enriched our discipline by his own work and by bringing successive generations of students to the field.

JOHN GAUS AWARD AND LECTURESHIP

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

Award Committee: Karen Mossberger, Arizona State University; Norma Riccucci, Rutgers University; and Gene Brewer, University of Georgia

Recipient: Paul C. Light, New York University

Citation: Paul C. Light is the recipient of the 2015 John Gaus Award and Lectureship, which honors a lifetime of exemplary scholarship in the joint tradition of political science and public administration. Light is currently the Paulette Goddard Chair of Public Service at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and founder of the Global Center for Public Service. His prior positions include vice president for governmental studies and Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, director of the Public Policy Program at the Pew Charitable Trusts, and associate dean at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of the University of Minnesota.

The letter nominating Light described his body of research as “focusing the disciplinary lens of political science on enduring questions of public administration.” Indeed, Light has an outstanding and prolific record of scholarship on government at the intersection of public administration, political science, and public policy, with research on bureaucracy, civil service, Congress, entitlement programs, the executive branch, government reform, nonprofit effectiveness, organizational change, and the political appointment process. He has authored 20 academic books, 4 books that translate issues for more general audiences, and scores of peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and research reports.

This research has earned frequent recognition from his peers. Light is a winner of three book awards, including the 2010 Herbert Simon award for A Government Ill Executed: The Decline of the Federal Service and How to Reverse It, and two Louis Brownlow Book Awards from the National Academy of Public Administration, for The Tides of Reform: Making Government Work, 1945–1994 and Thickening Government: Federal Hierarchy and the Diffusion of Accountability. His dissertation on the president’s agenda and domestic policy choice, which later appeared in print in three editions, won the E. E. Schattschneider Award from APSA.

In addition to his intellectual leadership in universities and research institutes, Light has also made important contributions to public service throughout his career. From his time as a staff member of the US Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, he has actively worked to communicate research to policymakers. He has given testimony before Congress on 27 separate occasions and has served on high-level national commissions, the National Commission on the American State and Local Public Service (Winter Commission), and the National Commission on the Public Service (Volcker Commission). Currently, he is a senior advisor for the Volcker Alliance, a senior fellow of the Governance Institute, and a fellow of the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Center for Excellence in Government. A fellow of the prestigious National Academy of Public Administration, Light was the 2007 Elmer Staats Lecturer for NAPA. He has also served on boards and task forces for the Association of Public Policy and Management and the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration.

The committee is pleased to honor Light’s many scholarly accomplishments and distinguished service with the 2015 John Gaus Award.

HUBERT H. HUMPHREY AWARD

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

Award Committee: Liz Gerber, University of Michigan; Marion Orr, Brown University; and Carmen Sirianni, Brandeis University

Recipient: Beverly Scott

Citation: Beverly Scott holds a PhD in political science from Howard University and has spent the last 30 years in leadership positions in the world of public transportation. Most recently, she served as general manager and CEO of Atlanta’s Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) and then as general manager and CEO of Boston’s Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA). Throughout her career, Scott has demonstrated courageous leadership, balancing the demands of myriad stakeholders both within and outside of the organizations she has led, taking on controversial issues and deftly confronting her political adversaries. She has been a strong and compelling voice for transportation equity. Her leadership has been recognized through numerous awards and honors. Scott was recently nominated by President Obama to serve on the National Transportation Safety Board. The committee believes her record of distinguished public service, built on her training and background as a political scientist, makes Scott an exemplary candidate for the Hubert H. Humphrey Award.

DISTINGUISHED TEACHING AWARD

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

Award Committee: Amy Black, Wheaton College; Tomas Koontz, University of Washington, Tacoma; and Michael Leo Owens, Emory University

Recipient: John Ishiyama, University of North Texas

Citation: It is with great delight that this year’s committee recognizes John T. Ishiyama, University Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas, as the 2015 APSA Distinguished Teaching Awardee. Although we received impressive nominations, the committee agreed that John Ishiyama was most deserving of this award in recognition of his outstanding record of care, concern, and craft. A nationally and internationally acclaimed scholar and leader, his record demonstrates great love for teaching and mentoring as well as outstanding commitment to scholarship and service.

Ishiyama’s foundational work and leadership within APSA has helped build important infrastructure to promote scholarship of teaching and learning, enhanced research on teaching and learning, and left a strong legacy for future educators. He served as founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Political Science Education from 2004 until 2012, when he assumed the role of lead editor of the American Political Science Review. He was one of the founders and architects of the APSA Teaching and Learning Conference, an important conference that equips and encourages political science educators around the world. His impressive range of pedagogical articles, papers, and monographs testify to his commitment to elevating teaching in the discipline. His wide range of accomplishments also includes directing undergraduate research programs, securing grants to fund research and mentoring programs, and serving in leadership roles with the APSA Teaching and Learning Committee and Pi Sigma Alpha.

It is likely little surprise that Ishiyama has received many awards for his teaching, research, and mentoring. His recognitions include the Ronald E. McNair Program Outstanding Service Award, the Ulys and Vera Knight Faculty Mentor Award, the APSA Political Science Education Distinguished Service Award, the Quincy Wright Distinguished Scholar Award, the Carnegie Foundation US Professor of the Year for Missouri, the Missouri Governor’s Award for Teaching Excellence, and the William O’Donnell Lee Advising Award. It is an honor for us to add the 2015 APSA Distinguished Teaching Award to these many accolades.

BENJAMIN E. LIPPINCOTT AWARD

The Benjamin E. Lippincott Award was established by the Association to recognize a work of exceptional quality by a living political theorist that is still considered significant after a time span of at least 15 years since the original date of publication. The award is presented biennially.

Award Committee: Melissa Lane, Princeton University; Bob Goodin, The Australian National University, Canberra; and Robert Gooding-Williams, Columbia University

Recipient: James C. Scott, Yale University. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1998)

Citation: James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State is a magisterial work of exceptional quality. By compelling us to conceptualize state agency as predicated on creating a certain sort of “legible” knowledge about its subjects and environment, it has transformed our understanding of the nature of state authority and power. While the book has been highly influential across many areas of political science, and its author is at home in the wider discipline and in a number of related disciplines as well, we consider his voice in the central argument of this book (presented and honed originally in articles in prominent political theory publications) to have had an enduring significance for political theory in particular. Indeed this work demonstrates the value of political theory that is drawn out of meditation on exempla from a very wide range of contexts, comparative and historical. While the general form of the contrast between particular knowledge and oversimplifying generalizations, and the role of states in imposing those generalizations to the detriment of genuine social life, had been previously observed, Scott’s framing of the issue revealed how the very effort by states to produce knowledge of certain privileged kinds can also disable other crucial kinds of memory, insight, and political possibility. Seeing Like a State remains the indispensable source on the subject; we regard it as a classic work of political theory in our time.

CHARLES E. MERRIAM AWARD

The Charles E. Merriam Award was established by the Association to recognize a person whose published work and career represent a significant contribution to the art of government through the application of social science research. First presented in 1975, the award was revived in 1995 and is presented biennially.

Award Committee: Pippa Norris, Harvard University; Larry Dodd, University of Florida; and Joan Tronto, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Recipient: Donna Shalala, Clinton Foundation

Citation: Donna E. Shalala is notable both as a dedicated public servant and as a scholar committed to advancing public service. She began her contributions to public service in her formative scholarly writings about public finance. Serving as secretary to the “Big MAC,” the Municipal Assistance Corporation that managed to pull New York City out of its budget crisis in the 1970s, Shalala was able to put her academic research into action. After serving as Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1977–1980, she was appointed as president of Hunter College, City University of New York. From there, she became chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, where she served until called in 1993 to become Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, a post she held throughout the Clinton Administration, until 2001. At that point, she became president of the University of Miami, a post she held until recently; she currently heads the Clinton Foundation.

An unflagging supporter of expanding opportunities for everyone in society, Shalala has focused as a scholar on health and educational opportunities, on advancing equality for women, and on support for veterans. She made a federal response to AIDS a focus while at Health and Human Services. And she remains a supporter of the public role of research in the social sciences to advance public causes. Like Charles Merriam, both as a scholar and public official, then, Donna Shalala has embodied the commitment to academic and public service that we honor with this Award.

Recipient: Doug Rivers, Stanford University

Citation: Douglas (Doug) Rivers is also honored by the award in recognition of the outstanding role he has played over the past 30 years as innovator and entrepreneur in pushing forward new strategies in survey methodology, field experimentation, data accessibility, research sustainability, and empirical interpretation. He has innovated methods and data sources that are essential to the subsequent work of multiple generations of scholars in such fields as public opinion analysis, election studies, and congressional politics, particularly through his roles in helping to create and expand Knowledge Networks (with Norman Nie) and Polimetrix.

Additionally, as scholar, teacher, collaborator, and reviewer, he has helped to clarify and demonstrate the ways in which new methods and data can address critical issues in the interpretation of data, and thus in the understanding of politics, that previous scholars lacking such methods and data were forced to ignore.

Charles Merriam was noted for his commitment to innovative political and social science scholarship, and for his consequent efforts in founding the Social Science Research Council to foster such research. As innovator, scholar, entrepreneur, and teacher of the first order, Doug Rivers clearly follows in Merriam’s footsteps and is richly deserving of the Merriam Award.

Book Awards

RALPH J. BUNCHE AWARD

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

Award Committee: Michael D. Minta, University of Missouri, Columbia; Laurie Balfour, University of Virginia; and Rene Rocha, University of Iowa

Recipient: Megan Ming Francis, University of Washington

Title: Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State, Cambridge University Press.

Citation: Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State makes a theoretically and empirically rich contribution to the fields of American political development, interest group politics, and race and ethnic politics. Francis shifts the field from viewing state development only as a function of the actions of presidents and major events such as the Cold War or social movements. Instead she finds that the NAACP’s anti-lynching campaign in the early 20th century was instrumental in expanding state capacity by substantially increasing the power of the federal courts in criminal proceedings relating to lynchings and mob violence against blacks. Additionally, her book firmly establishes that the foundation for state involvement in civil rights was developed well before the passage of the 1960s landmark civil rights legislation.

GLADYS M. KAMMERER AWARD

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

Award Committee: Caroline Tolbert, University of Iowa; Cathy Johnson, Williams College; and James Garrand, Louisiana State University

Recipients: Craig Volden, University of Virginia and Alan Wiseman, Vanderbilt University

Title: Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress: The Lawmakers, Cambridge University Press

Citation: We are pleased to announce the recipient of the 2015 Gladys Kammerer Award: Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress: The Lawmakers by Craig Volden (University of Virginia) and Alan E. Wiseman (Vanderbilt University). Scholars and other political observers have bemoaned the policy gridlock in Congress, which is often linked to ideological polarization that stymies the creation of coalitions to support legislative proposals. Some legislators, however, are particularly adept at “getting things done” and are able to shepherd their legislation through the legislative labyrinth. In their excellent book, Volden and Wiseman explore the determinants of variation in legislative effectiveness among members of the US House of Representatives, as well as the consequences of legislative effectiveness for the policy process in Congress. Moving beyond lawmakers as re-election seekers, this book stands as a corrective to the scarcity of research on legislative effectiveness, which is a key factor in determining the degree to which Congress can respond to the demands of the American public.

Legislative Effectiveness makes several major contributions. First, the authors develop a new and intuitive measure of individual legislative effectiveness (the Legislative Effectiveness Score) that accounts for several components and the relative importance of those components. House members can be effective at different stages in the policy process—including bill sponsorship, committee action, floor action, bill passage in the House, and the bill becoming law—and these different stages vary in terms of their importance. Volden and Wiseman’s measure weights the importance of each stage in determining legislative outcomes.

Second, Volden and Wiseman isolate the determinants of legislative effectiveness, finding that seniority, pre-congressional legislative experience, majority party status, leadership roles, legislator gender and race, and electoral safety have strong effects on the outcome variable. The authors highlight the impact of gender, race, and region, finding that women in the majority party are more likely to be effective, but that African Americans and southern Democrats are less likely to be effective. Notable is that women more effectively build coalitions across party lines. This makes the low gender representation in Congress even more troubling.

Third, the authors note that legislative effectiveness varies across policy areas, and they estimate a series of models to explore the determinants of legislative effectiveness across these policy areas. They find that highly-effective legislators are more likely to guide landmark legislation through the legislative process, so understanding who is highly effective gives us an idea of who will be able to secure passage of important legislation, even during periods of gridlock.

Finally, in an aptly-named chapter “The Habits of Highly Effective Lawmakers,” Volden and Wiseman identify several characteristics of the most effective House members: (1) development of a legislative agenda that fits the members’ experience and expertise; (2) focus of one’s agenda on district needs; (3) using institutional power positions to be entrepreneurial; (4) openness to compromise, even with those who are not natural allies; and (5) cultivation of a broad set of allies, both within and without the chamber.

In sum, Volden and Wiseman make a major contribution to our understanding of the determinants and effects of legislative effectiveness; they help us to understand a policy process at the national level in the United States that has been characterized by gridlock and polarization. In an era in which “getting things done” in Congress is so difficult, it is important to study which legislators are able to overcome impediments and navigate the congressional lawmaking process successfully. Reframing the work of Congress from gridlock and party polarization to legislative effectiveness in the hands of capable lawmakers, Volden and Wiseman shine a hopeful light on the study of nation’s first branch of government.

VICTORIA SCHUCK AWARD

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

Award Committee: Christina Wolbrecht, University of Notre Dame; Nikol Alexander Floyd, Rutgers University; and Beth Reingold, Emory University

Recipient: Lisa Baldez, Dartmouth College

Title: Defying Convention: U.S. Resistance to the U.N. Treaty on Women’s Rights, Cambridge University Press

Citation: The 2015 Victoria Schuck Award committee recognizes Defying Convention: US Resistance to the UN Treaty on Women’s Rights by Lisa Baldez of Dartmouth University. In Defying Convention, Baldez addresses important and regretfully neglected puzzles regarding the failure of the US to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). In doing so, Baldez provides an extremely valuable, well-researched examination of what is at stake in the ratification of CEDAW, how CEDAW and its impact have evolved over time (and why), and the consequences of US non-ratification for women in the US and around the world. As only one of seven nations that have failed to ratify this important treaty, the US provides an ideal context for assessing the impact of gender and feminism on the formation of international frameworks and norms regarding inequality. Drawing from archival and secondary sources, direct observation, and multiple data sources, Baldez offers a nuanced, complicated, and politically, institutionally, and historically sensitive argument. Her careful attention to formal deliberations, debates between competing women’s groups, and mobilization of rhetorical strategies in solidifying women’s rights globally is particularly commendable. Defying Convention is a well-grounded transnational feminist study, one that carefully avoids using the US or Western frames to critique non-Western nations. In this respect, it exemplifies the best of transnational feminist political analysis. Indeed, Defying Convention is a sub-field and discipline boundary crossing work that should be of interest to students not only of international relations, but also of American politics, legal theory, comparative politics, and women’s and gender studies. It is also a text with relevance to policy-makers and activists beyond the academy. We are pleased to recognize this very important contribution to the study of women and politics.

WOODROW WILSON FOUNDATION AWARD

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

Award Committee: Chris Howard, College of William & Mary; Christina Schneider, University of California, San Diego; and Simone Chambers, University of Toronto

Recipients: Ben W. Ansell, University of Oxford, and David J. Samuels, University of Minnesota

Title: Inequality and Democratization: An Elite-Competition Approach, Cambridge University Press

Citation: This book challenges a central piece of conventional wisdom in political science—that economic inequality hurts the prospects for democracy. Greater inequality is supposed to increase demands for redistribution among the majority of citizens, which makes elites less willing to expand the franchise or otherwise relinquish power. The fundamental conflict is between haves and have-nots. In contrast, Ansell and Samuels maintain that “regime change does not emerge from autocratic elites’ fear that the poor would expropriate their wealth under democracy. It instead results when politically disenfranchised yet rising economy groups seek to rein in the power of autocratic elites to expropriate their income and assets” (p. 7; italics in original). Their argument has roots in John Locke and Enlightenment liberalism, and it has affinities with the work of Barrington Moore, Jr. Nonetheless, the authors combine theory and empirical evidence in original ways with wide-ranging implications.

Inequality and Democratization is a terrific example of multi-methods research. In chapters 2 and 3, the authors use historical case studies to illustrate problems with the conventional wisdom. In the 19th century, for example, the United Kingdom democratized while China did not, even though inequality in the UK was much higher. Other cases, such as Chile, Peru, and Imperial Germany, reveal that inequality of land ownership may have been more significant for democratization than inequality of income. Chapter 4 presents a formal model linking inequality to regime change. Unlike previous studies, the authors assume that the economy has two sectors (agriculture and industry), not one, and that elites may be divided (rising vs. established) rather than unified. Inequality may exist within each sector of the economy and between the sectors. Their model predicts that the likelihood of any transition to democracy varies depending on different forms of inequality; it decreases, for instance, when land inequality is high. The remaining chapters of the book provide statistical tests of this model, based on evidence from many countries over long periods of time. The authors provide a series of direct and indirect tests, using different model specifications, to demonstrate the robustness of their argument. The overall effect of combining these distinct methods is quite impressive.

The committee read a number of outstanding books this year, from all major sub-fields of the discipline. The authors asked big questions and marshalled substantial evidence to provide an answer. In the end, we favored arguments that had the potential to “travel” widely, beyond a specific place, time, or part of government. If the book could shed light on issues that mattered beyond the academy, so much the better. Inequality and Democratization passed both of these tests with flying colors, and we congratulate Ben Ansell and David Samuels for their tremendous accomplishment.

Dissertation Awards

GABRIEL A. ALMOND AWARD

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

Award Committee: Leslie Anderson, University of Florida; Nick Ziegler, University of California, Berkeley; and Hans Peter Schmitz, Syracuse University

Recipient: Adam Auerbach, American University

Dissertation: “Demanding Development: Democracy, Community Governance, and Public Goods Provision in India’s Urban Slums,” University of Wisconsin

Citation: This dissertation is about poverty and development in the urban slums of India and specifically about how low income Indian citizens can come together to combat poverty and gain access to basic public services such as drinking water, sanitation and waste removal, paved roads, public safety, and schools. Auerbach says that access to these basic services varies widely across India owing to greater or lesser levels of success by citizens within neighborhoods in working together to bring these services to the local area. Auerbach finds that the role of parties is essential in bringing services to communities and that dense party networks are key in bringing services. However, the density of those networks is greater where communities are more diverse so that it is the socially diverse and heterogeneous communities that are most successful in working together to bring in basic services.

We have chosen this dissertation as our winner for several reasons. First, this is a hopeful and empowering piece of work that looks closely at how disadvantaged citizens can act for themselves to improve their world. Second, the dissertation exhibits the strength of extensive fieldwork and combines qualitative and quantitative data. Auerbach spent two and one half years in the field doing his research and knows his Indian neighborhoods well. And finally the dissertation has implications for a broad range of scholarly fields. Speaking to studies of clientelism, Auerbach finds that low income citizens can and do resist clientelistic controls, accepting payments and voting their own conscience anyway. Engaging the literature on social capital, Auerbach finds that ties to parties and politicians are as important as are ties among citizens. And finally, in keeping with the diversity argument, Auerbach finds that ethnic diversity is related to greater community success in obtaining social services.

WILLIAM ANDERSON AWARD

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

Award Committee: Melissa Marschall, Rice University; Rob Preuhs, Metropolitan State College of Denver; and Kim Johnson, Barnard College

Recipient: Alexis Walker, Stetson University

Dissertation: “Solidarity’s Wedge: How America’s Federalized Labor Law Divides and Diminishes Organized Labor in the United States,” Cornell University

Citation: Why does organized labor punch below its weight in American politics? This project emphasizes the important role of institutions—namely divided labor law and federalism—in shaping the composition, size, strength, and effectiveness of organized labor in the American politics. Utilizing an American political development approach as well as data from a number of different sources, the dissertation finds that the exclusion of public sector employees from the foundation of private sector labor law, the 1935 Wagner Act, and federalized American labor law delayed the growth of public sector unions and contributed to both their legal vulnerability divisions within organized labor that affect union members and leaders’ political behavior today.

The committee was impressed with the breadth of the data and methods Walker employed to investigate her research question. She combined interviews with labor leaders, statistical analysis of survey data, secondary source analysis, and archival research. We also found the broader historical approach to be extremely well done. We learned a lot reading this dissertation and were very happy to see these important and overlooked research questions being tackled in such an ambitious and thorough manner. While the dissertation makes a number of important contributions to the field of federalism and intergovernmental relations, Walker’s analysis of how and why federalism matters for public sector collective bargaining rights can be applied to other rights-based policy areas as well (e.g., gay marriage, election laws).

EDWARD S. CORWIN AWARD

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

Award Committee: Jonathan Simon, University of California, Berkeley; Sara Benesh, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; and Ronald Kahn, Oberlin College

Recipient: Matthew Hitt, Louisiana State University

Dissertation: “Judgment-rationale inconsistency in the US Supreme Court,” Ohio State University

Citation: The winner of the 2015 Corwin prize for the best dissertation in public law is Matthew Hitt’s “Judgment-Rationale Inconsistency in the US Supreme Court.” Matthew Hitt advances an elegant theory that considers an important aspect of Supreme Court decision making with ramifications beyond the Court, one that frustrates many political scientists and lawyers: the plurality decision, or, in Hitt’s language, incidences of judgment-rationale inconsistency. Conducting rigorous and methodologically sophisticated tests of results from formal modeling, Hitt explores what drives judgment-rationale inconsistency, the slippage between outcome vote and rationale that emerges when there exists no opinion on which a majority of justices agree. In the strongest form of rationale inconsistency, the “discursive dilemma,” the opinions offered by the members of the majority are not only joined by fewer than a majority, but are also logically inconsistent with each other. Social choice theorists of judicial hierarchies have long thought that such dilemmas must have important consequences for strategic docket management, as well as the precedential value or systemic legitimacy of a decision. Taking the strong formal results about the inevitability of inconsistency in group decision making and applying it to a careful empirical analysis of the Court breaks new ground and offers to bring together empirical political scientists who pore over citations, and legal scholars who pore over the reasoning of particular opinions. Hitt asks how much of a pathology judgment-rationale inconsistency really is for the legitimacy of the rule of law in an advanced legal system, and whether it is getting worse over time. His findings suggest that such inconsistency, at least in its strongest form (the discursive dilemma), has significant negative impact on the precedential value of a decision and presumably the legitimacy of the Court issuing it. But, if this is pathology, it is one that has remained remarkably consistent over time and may be intrinsic in judicial hierarchies that are tasked with resolving politically contentious issues. Hitt’s careful combination of opinion analysis, memo analysis from the archives, and statistical analysis of citations, shows the Justices both as strategic actors aware of institutional pressure to resolve politically-charged conflicts and as discursive guardians that care deeply about the doctrines that emerge along with those outcomes. Indeed, according to Hitt, Justices regularly wound their own side in a policy conflict in order to protect a discursive position relevant to future cases. Hitt also helps us better appreciate those occasions, as in this past term’s dramatic Oberfell v. Hodges decision on same-sex marriage, when the majority signs onto a single opinion with no concurrences, despite what the oral argument suggested were significant differences on the doctrinal basis for the decision. Hitt’s ability to predict the circumstances under which the Court reaches out to decide cases despite the risk of discursive paradox is certain to launch a good deal of new research by both political scientists and Supreme Court legal scholars, but it also speaks in important ways to many other fields within law and courts by encouraging us to place political salience, legal discursive meaning, and systemic legitimacy into a common analysis.

HAROLD D. LASSWELL AWARD

The Harold D. Lasswell prize is awarded annually for the best dissertation in the field of public policy. The award is cosponsored by the Policy Studies Organization.

Award Committee: Peter May, University of Washington; Hahrie Han, Wellesley College; and Andrew Karch, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Recipient: Michael T. Hartney, Lake Forest College

Dissertation: “Turning Out Teachers: The Causes and Consequences of Teacher Political Activism in the Postwar United States,” University of Notre Dame

Citation: Michael Hartney provides an insightful study of the evolution and consequences of the role of teachers as a political force in American politics. The first part of the work addresses how rank-and-file teachers became an active and powerful political constituency beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. The second part examines the political potency of teachers and union activism in affecting K-12 educational policies and outcomes. The end result is a highly nuanced study that is very much in keeping with the Lasswellian tradition of studying political power and “who gets what, when, and how.”

Hartney traces the political awakening of teachers to the effects of state-level collective bargaining agreements, which spurred both union organization and activism. Exploiting variation in the timing of such laws, he finds the political activity of all teachers, not just union members, increased after the introduction of collective bargaining. He attributes this broader mobilization in political contributions and voter activism to spillover effects of union-based activism. These positive policy feedback effects and their spillovers created a powerful constituency among teachers.

Hartney examines the political potency of teachers in turning from traditional studies of the impacts of unions to studying the impacts of teacher and union activism. To get at these, he undertakes analyses of teacher pay and voting in local school district elections in Washington State; an experiment-based survey posing different information about parental and teacher preferences in gauging hypothetical support for teacher assessments among a sample of Indiana school board members; and teacher union support for maintaining teacher tenure in Virginia. The results from these studies show the power of teachers in influencing school board decisions for different issues and settings. Hartney also attempts to address the impact of teacher activism on student performance with admittedly speculative findings suggesting teacher union activism tends to block reforms like accountability-based testing that might promote better educational performance.

The end result is a very readable dissertation addressing teachers as a potent force in American K-12 education politics and policy. The focus on teacher political activism has contemporary policy relevance given the changing strategic relationship between unions and teacher activism. The well-executed empirical analyses rely on an impressive range of data sources and engage carefully with both alternative explanations and existing scholarship. Hartney’s dissertation represents the best of current public policy scholarship in addressing the interplay of policy and politics by blending historical analysis of institutional reforms, studying the implications of those reforms, and considering the policy feedback effects in mobilizing political action.

HELEN DWIGHT REID AWARD

The Helen Dwight Reid prize is awarded annually for the best dissertation successfully defended during the previous two years in the field of international relations, law, and politics.

Award Committee: Saadia Pekkanen, University of Washington; Bob Vitalis, University of Pennsylvania; and Audie Klotz, Syracuse University

Recipient: Nicholas L. Miller, Brown University

Dissertation: “Hegemony and Nuclear Proliferation,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Citation: Contrary to widespread predictions of nuclear domino effects, Miller’s timely and ambitious study uncovers the puzzle of a temporal decline in global interest in nuclear weapons. Using a “multicausal” approach, it historicizes our understanding of both why and how the United States affected the policy demands for proliferation abroad. The study also takes on the pessimism about sanctions. For states actually dependent on the US, the threat of sanctions dramatically increased their security, domestic, and normative costs of pursuing proliferation. Successfully combining both statistical and archival work, Miller makes us rethink the pursuit and efficacy of nonproliferation policies by the major powers.

E. E. SCHATTSCHNEIDER AWARD

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

Award Committee: Lonna Atkeson, University of New Mexico; Scott McClurg, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale; and Barbara Norrander, University of Arizona

Recipient: Danielle Thomsen, Duke University

Dissertation: “Party Fit in the US Congress: The Intersection of Ideology, Political Parties, and Gender,” Cornell University

Citation: Danielle M. Thomsen’s dissertation focuses on two seemingly unrelated questions and their intersection. First, she examines patterns of candidate emergence to the US Congress and its relationship to party polarization. Second, she examines how candidate emergence relates to the increasing number of Democratic women in Congress and the lack of growth in the number of Republican women in Congress. There are more than three times as many Democratic than Republican women in the contemporary Congress, but throughout the 1980s women’s representation across the parties was largely the same! Importantly Thomsen develops a theory of “party fit” and shows that more liberal Republican and more conservative Democratic state legislators are less likely to run for Congress, contributing to a more ideological and polarized Congress. Because women Republican legislators tend to be more liberal than male Republican legislators, the result is that fewer Republican women run, which has a direct and negative effect on the representation of Republican women in the US House.

Thomsen’s methodology is diverse, using both quantitative and qualitative data. To address her first question she uses individual data on state legislator’s perceptions of winning and estimates of the ideology of state legislators to examine candidate emergence. She finds that ideology matters more to political ambition than gender, which influences who runs and the party-gender make-up of the Congress. She also examines member retention patterns and finds that more liberal Republicans and more conservative Democrats are more likely to retire, which also has implications for the party‐gender divide.

The committee was impressed with the variety of literature used to weave together a fascinating story about ideology, political parties, candidate emergence and gender, and politics. Most importantly, the committee was impressed with the number of implications that derived from her research, its focus on questions of descriptive and substantive representation at both the micro and macro level, and the value of thinking about the variation among women both theoretically and empirically. These contributions are far-reaching, advancing our understanding of the American political landscape from multiple perspectives while connecting individual decisions to macro political outcomes.

LEO STRAUSS AWARD

The Leo Strauss prize is awarded annually for the best dissertation in the field of political philosophy.

Award Committee: Ruth Abbey, University of Notre Dame; Elizabeth Cohen, Syracuse University; and Xavier Marquez, Victoria University of Wellington

Recipient: Teresa Mia Bejan, University of Toronto

Dissertation: “Mere Civility: Toleration and Its Limits in Early Modern England and America,” Yale University

Citation: In this thorough, sustained, and engaging work, Teresa Bejan straddles early modern transatlantic and contemporary American discourses of toleration and civility. Bejan explores what the ideal of civility adds to the injunction to tolerate those we disagree with, perhaps disapprove of, or are even disgusted by. The work is well informed by the vast secondary literature on each of the three early modern thinkers she enlists as proponents of toleration—Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Roger Wiliams. Bejan convincingly demonstrates that each of these influential theorists answers her question about the relationship between civility and toleration in his own distinctive way, adducing different understandings of civility and of its contribution to a regime of toleration. Breathing new life into canonical texts and familiar themes, Bejan also consistently and convincingly considers their relevance for twenty-first century political life. This excellent dissertation is scholarly, careful, intelligent, engaged and engaging, extremely well written, and wide-ranging without ever blurring its focus. Bejan’s deft and confident tour through interesting and important matters still manages to exude a sense of humor and a delight in the doing of political theory.

LEONARD D. WHITE AWARD

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

Award Committee: Leisha DeHart Davis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Manny Teodoro, Texas A&M University; and Kelly LeRoux, University of Illinois, Chicago

Recipient: Katherine Bradley, Mathematica

Dissertation: “Who Lobbies the Lobbyists? Bureaucratic Influence on State Medicaid Legislation,” University of Michigan

Citation: The 2015 Leonard D. White Dissertation Award Committee has selected as its winner: Katharine Bradley’s “Who Lobbies the Lobbyists? Bureaucratic Influence on State Medicaid Legislation.” Bradley poses a novel question: Do bureaucrats lobby interest groups? If so, how and under what conditions? To explore the question, she conducted interviews and telephone surveys with interest groups in 25 states. Her findings reveal that bureaucrats engage in indirect lobbying, defined as bureaucrats asking interest groups for lobbying assistance. Indirect lobbying is higher when gubernatorial budgetary power is weak and when state agency capacity is small; these relationships, in turn, are moderated by agreement on policy between interest groups, bureaucrats, and the governor’s office. The end result is an original contribution to theories of bureaucratic power and behavior, delivered using multiple methods that substantiate the significant ideas at hand.

Paper and Article Awards

FRANKLIN L. BURDETTE PI SIGMA ALPHA AWARD

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

Award Committee: David Canon, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Jonathan Fox, American University; and Anna Law, CUNY Brooklyn College

Recipients: Alexander Kuo, Cornell University; Neil Malhotra, Stanford Graduate School of Business; and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo, Vanderbilt University

Title: “Why Do Asian Americans Identify as Democrats? Testing Theories of Social Exclusion and Intergroup Solidarity.”

Citation: This paper examines why nearly three-fourths of Asian Americans vote for Democratic candidates in presidential elections, despite prevailing research that indicates they should vote for Republicans because of their relatively high income. The authors show that both social exclusion (being viewed as “less American” than others) and intergroup solidarity (perceived common interests with other ethnic minorities that support the Democratic Party) explain Asian Americans’ support for Democratic candidates. These findings are supported by a large-scale representative survey and two experimental studies. This excellent paper contributes to our understanding of identity politics and the coalitional bases of political parties.

HEINZ I. EULAU AWARD

The Heinz I. Eulau prize is awarded annually for the best article published in the American Political Science Review and for the best article published in Perspectives on Politics in the calendar year. Two Eulau Awards are made, one for each journal. Committee members are asked to help make the selection from one journal or the other, and the chair is asked to participate in both decisions.

Award Committee: Gary Segura, Stanford University, chair

Donald P. Haider-Markel, University of Kansas, Perspectives on Politics

Mara Sidney, Rutgers University, Newark, Perspectives on Politics

Nicole Mellow, Williams College, American Political Science Review

Margit Tavits, Washington University in St. Louis, American Political Science Review

Recipients: Zoltan L. Hajnal, University of California, San Diego, and Jeremy D. Horowitz, University of California, San Diego

Title: “Racial Winners and Losers in American Party Politics,” Perspectives on Politics, 12 (1): 100–118

Citation: Since the New Deal and especially since the 1964 Civil Rights Act, African Americans have given growing majorities of their votes to Democratic candidates. Similarly, while President George W. Bush managed to secure as much as 40% of the Latino vote in his 2004 reelection campaign, in the most recent election, Latinos gave 71–73% of their votes to Democrats. Finally, Asian Americans, who gave only 31% of their votes to Bill Clinton in 1992, voted 73% Democratic in 2012.

Republicans and Democrats have long argued about whether minority voters were getting their vote’s worth in terms of policy delivery for their Democratic candidates or, as the GOP and its leadership has suggested, they have been taken for granted and convinced to accept policies that constrain—rather than facilitate—minority social mobility and economic success.

Hajnal and Horowitz use critical measures of economic well-being to fill a gap in our knowledge about the link between government responsiveness, parties, and minority vote. Looking at median income, poverty rates and unemployment rates for African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans, these authors repeatedly find that Democrats have delivered for communities of color when compared with GOP administrations. All three of the groups examined enjoy greater economic prosperity under Democratic presidents than Republicans.

Importantly, the authors do not suggest that communities of color do as well as they might have under Democratic administrations, only that they do better than they would under GOP leadership. Second, whites do no worse under Democrats than Republicans and what evidence there is appears to suggest that they, too, do slightly better under Democratic administrations.

The committee found this work a perfect example of how political science can engage real-world circumstances to offer an evidence-based evaluation of the representativeness of our political system and the particular circumstances of racial and ethnic minorities. As one member of the committee noted, as the nation inches toward a “majority-minority” status, this topic grows more important every day.

Recipients: Carles Boix, Princeton University, and Frances Rosenbluth, Yale University

Title: “Bones of Contention: The Political Economy of Height Inequality.” American Political Science Review 108 (1): 1–22

Citation: This work of historical political economy is innovative and path-breaking in the extreme. Boix and Rosenbluth are seeking some answers to the important questions on the origins of inequality, but doing so by examining the sweep of human history where such inquiry has been absent, largely due to data limitations—before the second world war.

The data employed are archaeological and ethnographic findings on human height, which the authors persuasively argue are an effective measure of resource access and distribution. Then using historical data on experiences as wide ranging as ancient Egypt and Greece, indigenous populations of North and Central America, medieval and modern Europe and 19th Century North America, the authors test the effects of economic institutions, agricultural production regimes and war-making technologies on the distribution of resources and nutrition.

The findings offered here, while limited by the scope and availability of data, illustrate the effects of economic, institutional and military factors on resource distribution. Moving from individualist economies of hunting/gathering and subsistence farming to those more likely to produce surplus, including economies-of-scale production farming, introduces substantially increased in equality and, by extension, height variation. Similarly, egalitarian societies with responsive and constrained political leadership, as different as Zuni Puebloan peoples and 19th C American Midwesterners, resulted in more equitable distributions of resources while hierarchical societies with strong aristocratic classes and extractive political leadership—such as pre-revolutionary France—produce substantial inequalities with resulting physical differences.

The committee found this paper to be a tour de force, not merely in its use of previously untapped data, its offer of a broad and ranging theoretical structure, and the use of design to isolate the relationships of interest, but also because the findings on political determinants of historical resource mal-distribution are sadly as relevant today.