Past Awards

The Comparative Democratization section made the first of what will be annual awards for the best book and best article published in the preceding year at the 2003 APSA meeting. (As the 2003 awards were our section's first awards, they included publications from 2001 and 2002. Future awards will recognize works published in a single year, as explained below.)

2011 Award Winners

Juan Linz Dissertation Award: Ekrem Karakoc (Pennsylvania State University) won the Juan Linz Dissertation prize for his work on “A Theory of Redistribution in New Democracies: How Democracy Has Increased Income Disparity in Southern and Postcommunist Europe.”

Prerna Singh (Princeton University) was awarded an honorable mention for a dissertation on “Subnationalism and Social Development: A Comparative Analysis of Indian States.”

This year’s award committee included Stathis Kalyvas (Yale University) (chair), Victor Shih (Northwestern University), and Maya Tudor (University of Oxford).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winners: “The Committee is pleased to present Ekrem Karakoc with the Juan Linz Dissertation Award for his dissertation on “A Theory of Redistribution in New Democracies: How Democracy Has Increased Income Disparity in Southern and Postcommunist Europe.”

“Using both large N analysis case studies of Spain, Turkey, the Czech Republic, and Poland, Karakoc reminds us that not all democratization waves are created equal. Although overall, democracies are more egalitarian than dictatorships, new democracies remain highly unequal—they have failed to reduce inequality. More generally, the thesis goes against the widespread perception that democracy provides higher levels of growth, higher levels of welfare, and a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. Recent democracies do not perform as expected. The thesis argues that poor citizens are not mobilized and do not vote and that weak party system institutionalization has a regressive effect on spending. Instead, government spending targets those who organized during the authoritarian period, rather than outsiders: civil servants, unionized skilled workers, the military, etc. Urban and rural poor are demobilized and left out. This is a piece of work that qualifies a lot of what we think we know about democracies today (think of Acemoglu and Robinson), is superbly researched and crafted, and does an excellent job in identifying the mechanisms connecting this outcome to its putative causes.”

Honorable Mention: Prerna Singh, “Subnationalism and Social Development: A Comparative Analysis of Indian States”

“This thesis begins by observing the striking variation in social development indicators across Indian states, especially educational and health outcomes, and argues that what helps explain this variation is the type of political community created. More specifically, Singh finds that the cohesiveness of subnationalist identification affects how progressive state social policy will be as well as its collective action by citizens. This is established via a comparison of Kerala and Tamil Nadu versus Uttar Pradesh. Rajsasthan is used as a case of transition from less to more cohesive subnationalist id that also moves in the expected direction on the social indicator front. A key message is that nationalism is the deeper driver behind good social outcomes. The work is extremely rich, combining archival research, census, survey and macro-economic data; and elite interviews, focus groups meetings, and participant observation.”

Best Book Award: Timothy Frye (Columbia University) and Monica Nalepa (University of Notre Dame) were co-winners of the best book award for their work on Building States and Markets after Communism: The Perils of Polarized Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Systems (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

This year’s committee members included Stephan Haggard (University of California at San Diego) (chair), Steven Wilkinson (Yale University), and Amaney Jamal (Princeton University).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winners: “Two books rose to the top of a very competitive field this year, both on Eastern Europe yet both addressing critical issues facing new democracies worldwide.

Timothy Frye’s Building States and Markets After Communism (Cambridge University Press) is the most comprehensive treatment to date of the political economy of economic reform in post-communist states. Comparing authoritarian and democratic regimes, Frye focuses on the conditioning effect of political polarization on the speed, coherence, and nature of market reforms. Working with a simple economic model with politicians, producers, and a dependent sector, Frye argues that democracies can combine incentives to producers and transfers that ease the transition; in an extension, he shows how these are combined somewhat differently depending on the partisan orientation of governments.

But this happy outcome is only likely when politics are not polarized. In politically-polarized settings, producers fear policy swings between governments and therefore under-invest, lowering the revenues needed to provide cushioning social insurance and services. Rather, politicians channel rents to favored and established firms, producing an erratic transition path; think Russia under Yeltsin.

Frye tests his model with both macro and micro data as well as rich case studies. He codes partisanship and polarization and looks at their effect on both the speed and consistency of reform and economic growth. He uses firm-level data to capture the reaction of producers to polarization, thus filling in the microfoundations of his macro approach. Recognizing the potential endogeneity of polarization, Frye devotes a chapter to the sources of partisan divisions, including a fascinating digression on how communist parties exploit nationalism to their political advantage. Rich and well-chosen case studies provide depth on a diverse range of cases from Russia and Bulgaria to Poland and Uzbekistan.

Monica Nalepa’s Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe, builds up from what appears to be a “small” question: lustration. Yet Nalepa shows that the issue of post-transitional justice is in fact implicated in all aspects of the transition process, from the positions oppositions take prior to democratization to the nature of the political order once democracy occurs. The skeletons in Nalepa’s title refer to the fact that virtually all oppositions to autocratic rule include people who collaborated with the ancien regime. This fact obviously influences the willingness of new governments to undertake probing lustration; authoritarian incumbents are more than happy to expose collaborators. The shadow of the skeletons—so to speak—falls on the transition itself: the more infiltrated the opposition, the more likely incumbents are to initiate negotiations and oppositions to offer guarantees. In meticulous detail and paying attention to mico-level mechanisms and alternative explanations, Nalepa offers a fascinating account about the politics surrounding lustration.

Nalepa’s book is built around a series of formal models characterizing these puzzles; not surprisingly, informational asymmetries play a central role in them. She picks cases that vary along key parameters and uses narratives to test the theory. She also utilizes surveys and public opinion and voting data to get at underlying preferences for lustration over time. Changing political circumstances, and particularly the emergence of altogether new parties not implicated in original bargains, is a key condition for bringing these skeletons out of the closet.

Even though used to generate predictions about lustration, her models have very much wider application to transition processes: the extent to which oppositions can take militant positions; the concessions they make to authoritarians; and the extent to which they can extirpate the old order. As Nalepa shows in a particularly well-crafted conclusion, the implications reach even beyond transitions. Democratic transitions that involve agreements with outgoing authoritarian leaders exemplify credible commitment problems and contracting more generally, issues to which the skeletons in the closet model also speak to.

The pool from which these books were drawn was a strong one, with major contributions by senior as well as junior scholars. Many books were worthy, but we were attracted to these two because of their tight integration of theory, research design, and the use of diverse empirical methods.”

Best Article Award: Ben Ansell (University of Minnesota) and David Samuels (University of Minnesota) won the best article award for their work on “Inequality and Democratization: A Contractarian Approach,” which appeared in the December 2010 Comparative Political Studies.

This year’s award committee included Ellen Lust (Yale University) (chair), Milan Svolik (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), and Lucan Way (University of Toronto).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winners: “The Committee for the Best Article in Comparative Democratization reviewed 340 articles published last year, finding the study of democratization is alive and well. We were impressed by a large number of interesting, carefully researched, and well-written pieces, drawn on research literally from across the globe. We are pleased to announce that among these, we found Ben Ansell and David Samuels’ article, “Inequality and Democratization: A Contractarian Approach,” published in Comparative Political Studies, to be of exceptional value in moving the field forward.

The article provides a novel contribution to a central debate in the study of democratization: namely, what is the relationship between economic development and democratization? Addressing recent scholarship of Boix, Arcemoglu, and Robinson, they argue that it is not the level of inequality and nature of asset mobility that affects democratization, but rather the source of inequality. Specifically, they argue that land inequality makes democratization less likely, but inequality derived from industrialization and financial sectors fosters partial democratization. To understand why this is so, they shift our attention from the predominant distributive approach to democratization to a contractarian approach.

The contractarian approach draws nicely from classical works of political philosophy (Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and Constant), contemporary neoinstitutional theories of the state (Levi, North, and Weingast, Olson) and critical works in political economy (Meltzer and Richards), to consider how economic development affects the interests and capabilities of various economic sectors to demand partial democratization. They argue that while high land inequality reflects the strong interests and ability of ruling autocrats to resist democratization, high inequality of industrial and financial sectors represents the emergence and expansion of a new bourgeoisie, which seeks partial democracy not in order to redistribute wealth, but precisely to prevent the governing, autocratic elites from confiscating their own growing assets and income. That is, as Ansell and Samuels note, a contractarian approach reminds us that “Democratization is not about whether the median voter is going to soak the rich; it is about whether citizens can obtain impartial protections from the state against expropriation.”

The argument is carefully explicated and tested through a formal model and quantitative analysis. In their model, Ansell and Samuels call into question a number of assumptions underlying some of the distributive models of democratization. They argue that autocratic regimes are more expropriative than democracies, even among elites; that inequality can vary both within and across economic sectors, independent of asset mobility, and that a more appropriate representation of the problem requires a three-actor model, with a small, landed elite, an industrial bourgeoisie, and the masses. Less explicitly, but also importantly, they distinguish between partial and full democratization, arguing that rising elites push for the former but not necessarily the latter. They then test the argument extensively using two data sets (one from 1858–1993 and a second from 1955–2004), two versions of the dependent variable (a dichotomous version and the 21-point Polity scale), and in both a linear and U-shaped model (a la Arcemoglu and Robinson). It is an impressive empirical assessment, particularly given the data limitations and the requirements of the theory.

In short, the article makes an important critique of distributive theories of democratization, explores an important distinction in inequality, and convincingly puts forth a novel, contractarian theory of the relationship between inequality and democratization. It reminds us that industrialization often creates high inequality as well as the expansion of a new bourgeoisie that may prefer partial democratization in order to protect their own rising assets. That is, democratization is not a struggle between elites and masses over the expropriation of resources, but also one between competing segments of elites. The goal of democratization is not simply a mechanism for reshaping the distribution of assets, but also for obtaining a mechanism for protecting expanding assets of a new bourgeoisie.

We believe these insights should shape the debate over economic growth, inequality, and democratization for years to come and commend Ben Ansell and David Samuels for a job well done.”

Best Field Work Award: Claire Adida (University of California, San Diego) was presented with the best field work award for her work on “Immigrant Exclusion and Insecurity in Africa.” Rodrigo Zarazaga (University of California, Berkeley) received an honorable mention for his work on “Peronist Hegemony and Clientelism: Strategic Interactions Among Mayors, Brokers, and Poor Voters.”

This year’s award committee included Giovanni Capoccia (University of Oxford) (chair), Gretchen Helmke (University of Rochester), and Sunila Kale (University of Washington).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winners: “The Committee is very pleased to announce this year’s winner of the Award for the Best Field Research of the Comparative Democratization Section is Prof. Claire Adida. This is to honor the empirical fieldwork that she did for her dissertation “Immigrant Exclusion and Insecurity in Africa,” which she defended at Stanford University in 2010. The thesis analyzes important dynamics of South-South immigration in Niger, Ghana, and Benin, starting with an empirical puzzle. Adida notes wide variation in the extent to which immigrant communities are accepted by the host populations of the countries to which they move. To press the reasons for such variation, Adida developed an innovative theoretical perspective with a counterintuitive sensibility that argues that cultural similarity between immigrant and host communities works against the possibilities for integration. This is because host communities feel more competitive with culturally similar immigrant groups than they do with traders belonging to culturally dissimilar immigrant communities.

A large part of the empirical work for the dissertation consists of subtle and challenging fieldwork in several small communities in different contexts in urban Africa. Here Adida skillfully blended in-depth interviewing with the analysis of original surveys, in which she embedded an experiment that added further analytic leverage to her survey findings. In short, Adida carries out challenging, difficult, and innovative fieldwork in multiple settings, in order to refine and test an original theoretical perspective.”

Honorable Mention – Rodrigo Zarazaga

“The Committee unanimously agreed to award an honorable mention to Rodrigo Zarazaga for the fieldwork that he conducted for his dissertation on clientelistic politics in Argentina. The dissertation, entitled “Peronist Hegemony and Clientelism: Strategic Interactions Among Mayors, Brokers, and Poor Voters,” is theoretically and empirically very rich. One key contribution is that brokers are essential for clientelistic parties not least because of their local knowledge of the voters’ “reservation value.” This allows parties to trade for votes at an efficient price. Zarazaga’s fieldwork consisted of interviews with 120 brokers in several Argentinean municipalities, often carried out in difficult and challenging conditions. The fieldwork and the findings constitute an important contribution to the study of vote-buying, fraud, and clientelism.”

Best Paper Award: Robert D. Woodberry (University of Texas at Austin) was presented for the best paper award for his work on “Weber Through the Back Door: Protestant Competition, Elite Power Dispersion, and the Global Spread of Democracy” (presented at 2010 APSA meeting). Thad Dunning (Yale University) and Susan Stokes (Yale University) were recognized as honorable mentions for their work on “How Does the Internal Structure of Political Parties Shape Their Distributive Strategies?” (presented at 2010 APSA meeting)

This year’s award committee included Jeffrey Kopstein (University of Toronto) (chair); Alexandre Debs (Yale University); and Jennifer Gandhi (Emory University).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winners: "The committee awarded the prize to Robert D. Woodberry, of the sociology department at the University of Texas at Austin, for his paper “Weber Through the Back Door: Protestant Competition, Elite Power Dispersion, and the Global Spread of Democracy.” The paper addresses a core thesis of comparative politics, the relationship between mass religious affiliation and political development. Weber’s original design connected the orientation of Protestant dissenters to a specific orientation toward work and leisure. Woodberry refocuses Weber’s insight to account for variation in regime type and also moves the focus of attention beyond the particularities of European history. In this way, he reconnects modern social science with one of the classics of social theory, challenging current theories of democratization taken from political science and economics. The paper is beautifully written, thoroughly researched, and adds significantly to the corpus of knowledge in a key area of comparative politics. The committee therefore unanimously agreed that it should be awarded the prize for best paper in Comparative Democratization."

Honorable Mention - Susan Stokes and Thad Dunning

"The committee also awarded an honorable mention to Thad Dunning and Susan Stokes, of Yale University, for their paper “How Does the Internal Structure of Political Parties Shape their Distributive Strategies?” The paper addresses an important question of distributive politics: do parties target loyal supporters or swing voters? The paper provides an answer using a multi-method approach. First, they present survey evidence from three countries, Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela, concluding that parties tend to target loyal supporters and swing districts. Then, they explain their finding through a formal model, capturing the strategic interactions between party leaders and party brokers. The paper offers exciting possibilities for future research on this important question."

2010 Award Winners

Juan Linz Dissertation Award: Agustina Giraudy “Subnational Undemocratic Regime Continuity After Democratization: Argentina and Mexico in Comparative Perspective” (UNC Chapel Hill) and Evangelos (Evan) Liaras “Ballot Box and Tinderbox: Can Electoral Engineering Save Multiethnic Democracy?” (MIT) were the cowinners of the 2010 Juan Linz Dissertation Award.

This year’s award committee included Catherine Boone (University of Texas, Austin) (chair), Gerardo Luis Munck (University of Southern California), and Daniel Ziblatt (Harvard University)

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winners:
Agustina Giraudy’s dissertation breaks with the traditional focus of democracy studies on national level developments and tackles the question, What impact do democratic national authorities have on sub-national democratization? Giraudy addresses this question in the context of Mexico and Argentina using a variety of methods and comparisons. The two countries are compared; a quantitative analysis of Mexico’s 32 states and Argentina’s 24 provinces is conducted using a new subnational dataset; and a qualitative comparison of two Mexican states and of two Argentine provinces, relying on extensive fieldwork and numerous interviews, is carried out. The results validate the turn to subnational level analysis and are discouraging: national-level democratization is not always associated with subnational-level democratization. Rather, democratic national authorities frequently have both an incentive to shore up nondemocratic subnational authorities —inasmuch as these actors can assist in the building of political coalitions—and the means to extract their support—a variety of fiscal and partisan instruments. Moreover, nondemocratic subnational authorities have the capacity to resist efforts of national authorities to transform politics at the subnational level. This is an ambitious dissertation that breathes new air into the study of democratization and that makes an exemplary use of the multiple methods that are available to students of comparative politics. It also has important implications for public policy, raising questions about the wisdom of the standard call for greater decentralization of power.

Evangelos Liaras's dissertation addresses one of the central issues in Political Science: How can we design institutions, specifically electoral institutions, to dampen ethnic conflict and promote democracy? He focuses on a comparison of plurality and proportional representation (PR) systems, following scholars such as Lijphart and Horowitz in asking which of these systems best addresses the challenges of multiethnic democracy. Beginning with a series of models that generate hypotheses about the effects of rule change on ethnic party formation and ethnic voting under different assumptions about ethnic demography and geographic configurations of party support, Liaras tracks the effects of institutional change in Turkey, Sri Lanka, N. Ireland, and Guyana -- the universe of states that have introduced more proportional electoral systems as a way to mitigate longstanding communal conflict. He finds that in these cases, theories predicting that greater proportionality will produce more cross-ethnic voting or cooperation-promoting patterns of party fragmentation do not pan out. In many critical respects, voting and party patterns have remained constant despite attempts at electoral engineering meant to change them. The analysis is based on a reconstruction of voting patterns at the level of constituencies and districts over time, as well as on archival and interview research in each of the four countries. Liaras concludes that other institutional factors, such as citizenship restrictions (in Sri Lanka), and more diffuse political factors, such as the majority group's willingness to engage minorities and on what terms (in Turkey), seem to play preponderant roles in shaping the outcomes of interest. The electoral system itself is not the decisive factor. As Roger Peterson wrote, Evan's dissertation "has the potential to truly change the way both political scientists and policymakers think about the role of electoral institutions and the chances of mitigating conflict through institutional design.

Best Book Award: Zachary Elkins (University of Texas, Austin), Tom Ginsburg (University of Chicago), and James Melton (IMT Institute for Advanced Studies) won be the Best Book Award for their work on The Endurance of National Constitutions Cambridge University Press).

This year’s award committee members included Anna Grzymala-Busse (Chair) (University of Michigan), Jacques Bertrand (University of Toronto), and Thad Dunning (Yale University).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winner:
The Endurance of National Constitutions asks a critical puzzle in the study of democratic institutions and democratization: why do some constitutions persist, while others fail to survive? The authors offer a compelling new explanation that focuses on the specificity, inclusiveness, and flexibility of constitutional design. The dataset is particularly impressive, based on the collection of constitutional texts stretching back more than 200 years. It provides a rich comparative assessment of the longevity of constitutions, their scope and specificity, as well as trends in constitutional innovations. The manipulation and presentation of this data offer an unprecedented insight into the nature of constitutions over time. By emphasizing the importance of design over environmental factors, the book convincingly shows that constitutions have qualities and durability that survive and sometimes shape institutional change. This is a work of real scope and ambition, and it blazes important new trails as it (explicitly) leaves some important questions for future theoretical and empirical work.

Best Article Award: Daniel Ziblatt’s (Harvard University) “Shaping Democratic Practice and the Causes of Electoral Fraud: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Germany” American Political Science Review (February 2009) and Dan Slater’s (University of Chicago) “Revolutions, Crackdowns, and Quiescence: Communal Elites and Democratic Mobilization in Southeast Asia” by Dan Slater American Journal of Sociology (July 2009) won the 2010 Best Article Award.

This year’s award committee members included Evan S. Lieberman (Chair) (Princeton University), Eva Bellin (Hunter College), and Steven Levitsky (Harvard University).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winner:
Daniel Ziblatt’s “Shaping Democratic Practice and the Causes of Electoral Fraud” makes new and important contributions on both the empirical and the theoretical fronts. The article employs an innovative empirical strategy to demonstrate the causal link between inequality and electoral fraud in Imperial Germany (1871-1912). Ziblatt’s use of original data to demonstrate a statistical relationship between land inequality and the incidence of fraud is itself a major contribution. In particular, the committee found that the article’s strength lies in its exploration of causal mechanisms, and its demonstration that local elite capture of state electoral administration, rather than traditional or “private” landlord control over peasants, was the primary source of fraud. More broadly, the article shows that conservative elites may defend their interests not only by avoiding or overthrowing democracy, but also via a range of practices within a context of formal democratic rule.

In “Revolution, Crackdowns, and Quiesence” Dan Slater highlights the importance of non-material factors in mobilizing the high-risk collective action that is often key to spelling the collapse of authoritarian regimes. Employing comparative historical analysis in seven Southeast Asian countries, “Revolution, Crackdowns, and Quiescence” traces the powerful role that emotive appeals to nationalist and religious solidarities play in driving mass urban protest. The piece is masterful in its analysis and critique of prior literature on the role of social forces in democratization. Its presentation of a cultural analysis of contentious politics is insightful and an important correction to excessive focus on class actors and material factors in driving democratization. The piece is notable for its ambition to identify the way history systematically structures elite “autonomy and salience” – the keys to mobilizing religious and nationalist opposition to authoritarian regimes. Overall, “Revolution, Crackkowns, and Quiesence” is outstanding for its theoretical ambition, its elegant presentation, as well as its historical grounding in the Southeast Asian context.

Best Field Work Award: Alejandra Armesto (University of Notre Dame) won the Best Field Work Award for her dissertation on “Territorial Control and Particularistic Spending on Local Public Goods.”

Award committee members included Melani Cammett (chair) (Brown University), Fotini Christia (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Alexandra Scacco (Columbia University).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winner:
The committee is delighted to announce that the recipient of the 2010 Best Dissertation Fieldwork Award is Maria Alejandra Armesto (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame, 2010). Her innovative dissertation, titled “Territorial Control and Particularistic Spending on Local Public Goods in Argentina and Mexico,” interrogates the political logic of allocating local public goods in four Argentine provinces and four Mexican states. The central finding is that governors provide different kinds of public goods, which vary according to whether they are distributed to single households in specific communities or to areas that cut across diverse communities, to different regions. Governors base their decisions on their expected political gains and losses in particular electoral districts, taking into account whether mayors are loyal or in the opposition and whether they are weak or strong. Where a public good is contained within a given community, the governor can use her discretionary power to decide whether to grant or withhold the good; in areas where the good crosses boundaries, governors cannot prevent local mayors from claiming credit for some of the good.

The committee was impressed by the sheer breadth and depth of the empirical evidence that Armesto gathered to support her findings. Armesto collected data on a wide range of outcome variables, including seven local public goods whose provision are the responsibility of Mexican states and Argentine provinces. This in itself is a significant contribution given that even the best studies of clientelism often lack external validity because they tend to highlight only one form of particularistic spending at a time. In addition to her comprehensive dataset on spending on local public goods, Armesto conducted an original survey of subnational legislators (n = 164), in-depth interviews (n = approximately 150), and gathered supplementary evidence from relevant archival sources such as government reports and newspapers. Armesto’s thorough data collection efforts are complemented by careful attention to case selection: She selected research sites in a way that permitted variation on key variables central to rival explanations and on her own main predictors of interest. Her dissertation chapters describe this variation systematically and in a way that was helpful for readers not familiar with her Latin American cases.

Armesto’s dissertation generates important insights about the politics of public goods provision. For example, her work suggests that different public goods may be used by the same political actors in different ways, implying that a focus on a single good can bias inferences about the behavior of government officials and agencies. An interesting and nuanced argument combined with a rigorous set of empirical tests – both of her own argument and of alternative explanations in the literature – make Armesto’s dissertation richly deserving of the best fieldwork prize of the APSA section on Comparative Democratization.

Best Paper Award: Giovanni Capoccia (Oxford University) and Daniel Ziblatt (Harvard University) won the Best Paper Award for their work on“The Historic Turn in Democratization Studies: A New Research Program and Evidence from Europe.”

This year’s award committee included Scott Mainwaring (chair) (University of Notre Dame), Henry Hale (The George Washington University), and Dan Slater (University of Chicago).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winner:
The award committee is pleased to award the Best Paper in Comparative Democratization to “The Historic Turn in Democratization Studies: A New Research Program and Evidence from Europe,” by Giovanni Capoccia and Daniel Ziblatt. This manuscript impressively and thoughtfully lays the groundwork for a genuinely new research agenda on one of comparative politics’ oldest research topics: European democratization. Beyond merely identifying or proposing such a new agenda, Capoccia and Ziblatt have used their essay as an occasion and opportunity to gather a number of leading scholars in the field to contribute substantive essays that enact the kind of “historic turn” that they have in mind – as has now come to fruition in a the August-September 2010 special issue of Comparative Political Studies. Specifically, Capoccia and Ziblatt challenge their readers and their contributors to rethink the centrality of class in democratization processes, to recognize patterns of ideational diffusion and “iconic events” that influence the demand for democracy, and to consider the uneven and episodic character of regime change in historical time. Perhaps most excitingly, the authors draw provocative parallels between the unevenness of democratic development in 19th-century European cases and the evolution of diverse “hybrid regimes” in the wake of the Third Wave. Anyone hoping to theorize the world’s First Wave of democratization in light of the Third Wave, or vice versa, will both need to engage Capoccia and Ziblatt’s essay, and benefit from doing so. Since this essay more than any other struck the committee members as a “must-read” and “must-assign” contribution in the years to come, we unanimously agreed that it deserved the distinction of Best Paper.


2009 Award Winners

Juan Linz Dissertation Award: Lisa Blaydes (Stanford University) won the Juan Linz Dissertation Award for her work on “Competition without Democracy: Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt.” Her dissertation co-chairs were George Tsebelis and Leonard Binder.

This year’s award committee included Mary Gallagher (University of Michigan), Ben Ross Schneider (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and David Waldner (University of Virginia).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winner: After deliberation and discussion, the committee was unanimous in its decision to award the Linz Prize to Lisa Blaydes for her work on elections in Egypt. Rachel Beatty Riedl’s work on African party systems was a close second for the prize and received honorable mention. Both dissertations stood out for their strong commitments to important theoretical questions in the comparative democratization field with impressive and extensive field work and local knowledge. Blaydes’ dissertation, completed in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, analyzes “Competition without Democracy: Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt.” Blaydes examines the functionality of Egypt’s long-standing system of competitive parliamentary elections, arguing that these non-programmatic elections persist because they solve a number of different problems for several important political actors, including the regime that supports the running of elections, the candidates who spend money on their races, and the citizens who spend time voting in these elections. Blaydes employs a multidimensional research design that examines the core puzzle of competitive elections in authoritarian regimes through the eyes of these different actors. Blaydes’ work contributes to the developing research on modern authoritarianism and, in particular, the use of democratic institutions, such as elections, to sustain rather than undermine ambitious authoritarian leaders. Blaydes’ dissertation was also impressive for its innovative triangulation of methodologies including statistical analysis and qualitative interviews. Although a work on a single country, Egypt, Blaydes’ dissertation is an important theoretical contribution to the field and advances our thinking on the use of elections in authoritarian regimes.

Honorable Mention: Rachel Beatty, Princeton
Rachel Beatty Riedl (Ph.D from Princeton University) was awarded honorable mention for her work on “Institutions in New Democracies: Variations in African Political Party Systems.” Her dissertation advisor was Evan Lieberman. Riedl’s dissertation, completed in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, is an examination of “Institutions in New Democracies: Variations in African Political Party Systems.” Riedl seeks to explain the variation in party system institutionalization across third wave democracies in Africa. Using a multi-case study approach combined with cross-national statistical analysis, Riedl argues that it is the power of the authoritarian incumbent that shapes the electoral institutions of the emerging democratic system. Importantly, Riedl finds that strong authoritarian incumbents can improve the opposition’s ability to organize and coalesce through isomorphic competition between the incumbent authoritarian and the rising opposition.

Best Book Award: Thad Dunning (Yale University) won the Best Book Award for his work on Crude Democracy: Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes.

This year’s award committee members included Ellen Mickiewicz (Duke University) (Chair), Michael Bernhard (Pennsylvania State University), and Dietrich Rueschemeyer (Brown University).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winner: Publishers sent over forty books to the members of the committee. We divided the reading assignments; each nominated the top five; and then the committee came to a decision in a subsequent conference call, devoted to methodologies, research design, evidence, importance to the field and other factors. We had established from the beginning of the process that the book must be genuinely comparative in scope. Second, we distinguished democratization from democracy and excluded entries, for example, on good government, rather than on democratization, unless the connection was warranted. Crude Democracy applies superior scholarship and innovative research to an influential, widely accepted relationship—the so-called resources curse—and its exploitation by authoritarian governments. The book does not deny that these variables appear to be very often related; however, there are cases in which the rich resources support democratization. If so, then reevaluation is in order.

Dunning has applied simultaneously a number of methodologies to prove that, in fact, resource abundance can lead to democracy. The multi-method approach is, in part, generated using game theoretic means but confirmed using large-n cross-national regressions. In addition, five cases, four in Latin America and one in Africa, in which the author does extensive field work enable him to include small-n methods in the study. Crude Democracy seeks not to replace the widespread reliance on the “resource curse.” He studies in this fine book those cases in which natural resources can have a different, democratizing outcome. If there can be alternative outcomes, the different mechanisms leading to diverging outcomes are important to discover. Dunning analyzes, inter alia, conditions among elites and the rest of the population that must be present for resource abundance to result in the democratic outcome.

The Committee was unanimous in its appreciation of the originality and importance of the book, as well as its firm methodological grounding in the existing literature, formal analysis, and small-n analysis deriving from field work in six countries. The methodological foundation of this book would have to be convincing and solid, were it to make a contribution to the theory of one of the leading explanations of obstacles to democratization. The Committee congratulates Mr. Dunning for having done so.

Best Article Award: Dan Slater (University of Chicago) won the Best Article Award for his article on “Can Leviathan Be Democratic? Competitive Elections, Robust Mass Politics, and State Infrastructural Power,” published in Studies in Comparative International Development.

This year’s award committee members included Jason Brownlee (University of Texas at Austin) (Chair), Leslie Elliott Armijo (University of California at Berkeley), and Oisin Tansey (University of Reading).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winner: This deftly written article situates careful case study work in a lucid and edifying survey of relevant prior literature. Slater’s point of departure is the accepted wisdom that the most competent and arguably best-governed polities in East and South-East Asia—Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, and Taiwan— are or until recently were authoritarian. He then addresses the relationship of “state infrastructural power” (the ability to “penetrate civil society” and “implement political decisions throughout” the national territory) to democratization. In searching for the ingredients of democratic Leviathans—those that can both govern their citizens and restrain themselves—Slater sets aside variables of industrialization and per capita income and identifies the combination of genuinely competitive electoral politics (often elite politics in practice) with engaged mass political participation as the crucial path to good governance in a new or institutionally-fragile democracy. Displaying a deep familiarity with the history of his chosen cases—Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines —Slater shows robust mass politics can foster state-building and infrastructural power through three processes: mass party building, the inclusion and empowerment of marginalized constituencies through voter registration, and the marginalization of local bosses through the enforcement of centralized authority. He notes that this causal relationship departs from the Western European story of modernization some three to four centuries ago, when parliaments steadily curbed despotic authority and expanded infrastructural power. Slater’s article is wide-ranging, precise, and intensely provocative.

He is to be commended for tackling problems of state-building and order alongside questions of democratization and public contestation. Perhaps most importantly, his article reads easily and delivers important insights with minimal jargon. For these reasons, the committee judges that “Can Leviathan Be Democratic?” exemplified the articles addressing comparative democratization in 2008 and is the most likely to be assigned in a top graduate course on the subject a decade hence.

Honorable mention: Ellis Goldberg, Erik Wibbels, and Eric Mvukiyehe
The committee awarded an Honorable Mention to Ellis Goldberg (University of Washington), Erik Wibbels (Duke University), and Eric Mvukiyehe (Columbia University), for their co-authored article, “Lessons from Strange Cases: Democracy, Development, and the Resource Curse in the U.S. States,” published in Comparative Political Studies. The literature on oil wealth and rentier states occupies a major place in current debates about democracy and authoritarianism. Goldberg, Wibbels, and Mvukiyehe self-consciously address some of the field’s pitfalls by testing, in a novel fashion, the resource curse with sub-national evidence from economic and political development across states of the US during the entire twentieth century. They combine quantitative analysis of a new dataset with focused case studies of Texas and Louisiana.

Best Field Work Award: Mr. Alexandra Scacco (Columbia University) won the Best Field Work Award for his work on “Who Riots? Explaining Individual Participation in Ethnic Violence.”

Award committee members included Jonathan Fox (University of California, Santa Cruz) (Chair), Melanie Manion (University of Wisconsin, Madison), and Andrew Roberts (Northwestern University).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winner: Alexandra Scacco’s innovative dissertation draws on both qualitative and quantitative evidence to shed light on why people participate in Christian-Muslim riots in northern Nigeria. The study of the determinants of ethnic conflict is relevant to the study of comparative democratization because of the challenges it poses to elected governments. The research strategy combined in-depth interviews with original large-scale survey that included both participants and non-participants, comparing patterns in two different cities. In the process, she also successfully convened and coordinated a large team of Nigerian researchers. The field research deployed innovative sampling techniques to find both rioters and comparable non-rioters, as well as to shield the identity of the respondents. This allowed her not only to get more accurate responses, but also to be able to measure levels of bias. This focus on eliciting large numbers of frank responses avoided conventional tendencies to impute motivations based only on external assumptions about what drives observed behavior.

Best Paper Award: Judith Kelley (Duke University) won the Best Paper Award for her work on “D-Minus Elections: How Conflicting Norms and Interests Influence whether International Election Observers Endorse Elections.”

This year’s award committee included Jan Teorell (Lund University) (Chair), Adrienne LeBas (Oxford University), and Joshua Tucker (New York University).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winner: International election monitoring has been on the rise over the last twenty years, both in terms of frequency and substantial significance. The decision by monitoring organizations to endorse or not endorse an election is often seen as pivotal. But what determines this decision? Is it only election quality itself? In this award-winning paper, Judith Kelley shows that monitors’ assessments are guided by a range of often contradictory norms and practical interests, sometimes even swaying them into accepting highly flawed elections. Drawing on a novel data set, covering 591 observer missions to 305 national elections from 1984 to 2004, the author finds, for example, that the chances an election will be endorsed increase as irregularities take less obvious forms, such as when they mostly concern pre-election administrative flaws. But elections are also more easily accepted in the aftermath of pre-election violence, arguably in order to promote stability and avoid post-election conflict. Moreover, endorsement is more likely by IGOs than by NGOs, although this bias decreases as IGO membership grows more democratic. This paper is not only well-written and lucidly organized. It also presents novel theory, systematic new data and intriguing findings on what determines election observer endorsement. On all relevant dimensions—style, theory, data and findings—it is a model of a conference paper. By drawing out implications for constructivists and advocacy network scholars, the author also succeeds in bridging the divide between IR and comparativists in the future study of democratization.


2008 Award Winners

Juan Linz Dissertation Award: Mr. Juan Pablo Luna (Universidad Católica de Chile) won the Juan Linz Dissertation Award for his work on “Programmatic and Non-Programmatic Party-Voter Linkages in Two Institutionalized Party Systems: Chile and Uruguay in Comparative Perspective.” His dissertation advisor was Evelyne Huber (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Award committee members included Gwendolyn Sasse (Oxford University) (Chair), Aníbal Pérez Linán (University of Pittsburgh), and Juliet Johnson (McGill University).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winner:
The Juan Linz Prize is given to the best dissertation in the field of comparative democratization. This year’s award committee included Juliet Johnson (McGill University), Aníbal Perez-Linán (University of Pittsburgh) and Gwendolyn Sasse (University of Oxford). The committee was pleased to receive dissertations that presented a wide range of different angles on comparative democratization and varied in their regional focus. I am delighted to announce that the panel was unanimous in its decision. One dissertation clearly stood out from the rest. The winner of this year’s prestigious Juan Linz Prize is: Juan Pablo Luna Farina. Not only his first name makes him a worthy winner of the prize… Juan’s dissertation, completed in the Department of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, analyses the ‘Programmatic and Non-Programmatic Party-Voter Linkages in Two Institutionalized Party Systems: Chile and Uruguay.’ The dissertation explores the differences in the type and quality of linkages between citizens and politicians in Latin America. By choosing two different cases of higher quality representation in Latin America – rather than starting from an assumption of weakness – Juan effectively analyzes the determinants of the variation in the quality of representation. One of the counterintuitive findings is that political representation suffers in Latin America even under conditions where existing theories would expect high-quality representation to exist. What is most impressive about the dissertation is that Juan has managed to creatively and effectively combine quantitative and qualitative methods rather than just paying lip-service to the benefits of such an exercise. The dissertation’s exemplary research design rests on sophisticated survey data analysis, interview-based fieldwork, a qualitative examination of the path-dependent historical evolution of party-voter linkages, and a careful comparison of the two cases at the district level. The detailed analysis of local politics allows Juan, for example, to detect similarities in the strategies of two successful parties with opposite ideological leanings. Juan approaches his enormous amount of empirical data with conceptual rigor, a good eye for both the significant nuances and the generalizable trends. His findings enable a more nuanced understanding of the nature of political representation and deserve to be taken up by scholars working on other countries and regions of democratization. This is what we hope to encourage with the Juan Linz Prize. Congratulations on an excellent piece of research! We expect to hear a lot more about you in the future.

Best Book Award: The Best Book Award was delivered to Kenneth Greene (University of Texas at Austin) for his book, Why Dominant Parties Lose: Mexico’s Democratization in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and to Amaney Jamal (Princeton University) for her book, Barriers to Democracy: The Other Side of Social Capital in Palestine and the Arab World (Princeton University Press, 2008).

Award committee members included James L. Gibson (Washington University) (Chair), Sheri Berman (Columbia University), and Goldie Shabad (Ohio State University).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winners:
Why have dominant parties persisted in power for many decades in countries across the globe? Why after such long periods of dominance do most of these parties eventually lose? Kenneth Greene’s Why Dominant Parties Lose is a masterful investigation of these questions, and will be of great interest to all members of the Comparative Democratization section. Greene shows that the key to dominant parties’ success is their control over public resources. This allows them to engage in extensive patronage, attracting ambitious elites and ensuring voter loyalty. When the system works well, dominant parties are ensured of electoral support even before the voting begins; they are thus able to avoid the taint and potential loss of legitimacy that often accompanies electoral fraud or open repression. But Greene goes beyond this to show how dominant parties control over material resources does more than simply ensure their hold over elites and voters. He shows how it “warps” the development of opposition groups as well. Since the material incentives to support the dominant party are so high in these systems, only those with strong ideological commitments will opt out. This means oppositional parties are likely to be highly ideological, a factor that, when coupled with their lack of resources, limits their appeal to the most discontented, fringe elements. Given these dynamics, Greene shows that a dominant party is only likely to see its grip on power erode when its control over material resources wanes. (as when, for example, a state loses control over nationalized industries). Although his research and evidence is primarily drawn from the case of the PRI in Mexico, Greene extends his analysis to dominant party regimes in other authoritarian (Malaysia and Taiwan) and democratic (Japan and Italy) contexts. Greene’s findings have important implications for our understanding of dominant party regimes, their transitions to democracy, the stability/fragility of authoritarianism, and the interaction between economic and political reform.

The committee was impressed by the force and originality of Greene’s arguments, the scope and range of his methods and research, and the care he took to investigate the dominance, persistence and downfall of dominant parties. Why Dominant Parties Lose reminds us that investigating why democratization does not happen is as interesting and important as investigating why it does.

Amaney Jamal has written an excellent book on the origins of democratic attitudes and the effects of associational life on trust and support for particular regime types. She asks, are the sources of democratic attitudes different across different regimes types, and more specifically, do civic organizations have the same positive effects in authoritarian regimes as in democracies? These questions are of great importance to the comparative study of democratization. Using Palestine as her primary case study and looking closely at organizations linked to the Palestinian National Authority, she teaches us that civic organizations have very different effects in non-democratic states. Far from being schools for democrats as some of our literature would suggest, civic organizations produce actors who mirror the attitudes and behaviors of their political patrons. In keeping with the larger literature on social capital, she finds that members of associations do display higher levels of trust than non-members. But, breaking with the older literature, she shows that their attitudes toward democracy are ambivalent at best. The association between trust and democratic values posited in work from established democracies does not hold.

Jamal’s Barriers to Democracy is a fascinating test of the theory of social capital built with evidence from survey data, open-ended interviews with elites, observation of over one-hundred individual organizations, and comparative reference to Morocco, Egypt, and Jordan. The committee was impressed with the force and import of Jamal’s arguments and the truly impressive empirical data and research she brought to bear on her analysis. The study represents comparative politics at its best.

Best Article Award: Jason Brownlee (University of Texas at Austin) won the Best Article Award for his “Hereditary Succession in Modern Autocracies,” which appears in the July 2007 World Politics.

Award committee members included Richard Snyder (Brown University) (Chair), Robert Fishman (University of Notre Dame), and José Antonio Cheibub (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winner:
In addition to a dozen nominated articles, the committee considered all the articles published during the 2007 calendar year that were listed in the Comparative Democratization Section’s Newsletter. This yielded a total of 114 articles, which were divided equally among the 3 committee members. In evaluating the articles, the committee considered the importance of the core question addressed, as well as the magnitude of the empirical and theoretical contribution. The members of the committee were especially looking for work that made them think about issues of democratization in a new way. In particular, the committee aimed to select the article most likely to be assigned in a world-class graduate course on democratization taught ten years from now.

An Honorable Mention was awarded to Zachary Elkins (University of Texas at Austin) and John Sides (George Washington University) for their co-authored article, “Can Institutions Build Unity in Multiethnic States?” published in The American Political Science Review. This article offers a creative synthesis of literatures on nationalism, democratization, and conflict resolution. Moreover, it demonstrates an impressive and imaginative use of different data sets to address an important, timely question.

The Prize for the Best Article of 2007 was awarded to Jason Brownlee (University of Texas at Austin) for his article, “Hereditary Succession in Modern Autocracies,” published in World Politics. Brownlee’s analysis takes a two-pronged approach, addressing the questions: (1) under what conditions can dictators control their own successions? and (2) when dictators can control their own successions, how do they do it? Brownlee aims to explain why some rulers are able to “keep things in the family,” thereby extending their rule through hereditary succession and dynasticism. Brownlee cogently argues that understanding hereditary succession requires a focus on cases of non-hereditary succession, and he thus constructs an impressive and original data set of 258 dictators who ruled for at least three years during the post-World War II period. Brownlee builds an innovative explanatory framework focusing on the institutional context in which non-democratic rulers operate, especially on the critical relationship between authoritarian leaders and the political parties through which they govern. This focus on ruler-party relations yields a key finding: Where the ruler’s authority predates the party, hereditary succession is most likely, because there is no established institutional mechanisms through which elites who are not part of the ruling family can preserve the regime and, hence, their own privileges. Conversely, where the ruler is himself a product of a pre-existing party, hereditary succession occurs very rarely.

Brownlee’s analysis is important because it gets inside non-democratic regimes by focusing on ruler-party relations, thereby shedding new light on the contrasting fortunes of modern autocracies. The study is remarkable for its impressive empirical scope. Brownlee provides a unifying conceptual and explanatory framework that pulls together cases as disparate as Bulgaria, Paraguay, Haiti, Tanzania, China, Iran, North Korea, Singapore, and Togo. The committee thus concludes that Brownlee’s article is the most likely to be assigned in a world-class graduate course on democratization taught ten years from now.

Best Field Research Award: Daniel M. Corstange won the Best Field Research Award for his work on “Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Lebanon and Yemen.”

Award committee members included Kathryn Stoner-Weiss (Stanford University) (Chair), Michael Mitchell (Arizona State University), and Devra C. Moehler (Cornell University).

Committee’s Remarks to the Award Winner:
Corstange’s thesis uses truly innovative research techniques in exploring ethnic politics in Lebanon and Yemen. His superb work was carried out in particularly challenging field conditions. His project demonstrates a formidable command of variety of essential research skills – Arabic language mastery, experimentation, elite interviewing, and powerful observational capabilities. Finally, the mixed methodology Corstange employs, as well as the theoretical sophistication with which he pursues generalization in his work is very impressive. In our deliberations this summer, we found particularly insightful the observation that Bob Axelrod, Daniel’s dissertation supervisor made in his letter of recommendation for the award as particularly apt in summing up the reaction one has in reading this thesis: “why didn't I think of that?” Here is a dissertation destined to be used as a model for those committed to combining outstanding and intrepid fieldwork with the best of political science theory.

Honorable Mentions:
Jennifer Pribble (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) for “Protecting the Poor: Welfare Politics in Latin America's Free Market Era”

Pribble’s dissertation examines the divergence among Latin American countries in the extent to which they offer social protection. She conducts case studies of Chile and Uruguay, and combines these with a statistical analysis of all of Latin America. Of particular note in this fine work, is the remarkable breadth and depth of interviews with key political actors in each of her case studies. Her use of interviews is truly exemplary. The committee found this dissertation to be an impressive combination of some of the best aspects of quantitative and qualitative research.

Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro (Columbia University) for “Choosing Clientelism: Political Competition, Poverty, and Social Welfare Policy in Argentina”

Weitz-Shapiro’s dissertation is a remarkable study of something extremely hard to research – the effects of clientelism on voter behavior. She measures how local governments implement a federally funded social welfare program and uses this to assess to what degree voters might punish politicians who employ clientelism in making distributive choices. One of the more impressive aspects of this dissertation fieldwork is the organization required to assemble a team of Argentine students to carry out surveys of heads of social welfare agencies in 120 towns and cities in 3 provinces. Weitz-Shapiro combines this survey technique with an experiment to argue that middle class voters in particular frown on the use of clientelism by politicians in the distribution of social welfare. In sum, this dissertation combines exhausting and exhaustive fieldwork, and innovative research methodology in an impressive examination of a key and little understood aspect of Latin American politics.

Best Convention Paper: Jan Teorell (Lund University) and Axel Hadenius (Lund University) won the Best Convention Paper for their work on “Elections as Levers of Democracy: An Empirical Investigation.”

Award committee members included Kurt Weyland (University of Texas at Austin) (Chair), Kathleen Collins (University of Minnesota), Marsha Posusney (Bryant University).

Committee’s Remarks to Award Winner:
The Best Paper Prize Committee of APSA’s Comparative Democratization Section comprised of Kathleen Collins (University of Minnesota), Marcia Pripstein Posusney (Bryant University), and Kurt Weyland (University of Texas at Austin, chair) received a number of very good submissions this year. While the decision was not easy, the committee agreed on awarding the prize to Jan Teorell and Axel Hadenius of Lund University for their paper on “Elections As Levers of Democracy: An Empirical Investigation.” This paper analyzes a topic that is of central importance for democratization in particular and the study of political institutions in general, namely whether the holding of elections has a beneficial impact on democratization. A number of recent authors have advanced this optimistic claim and backed it up with a good deal of statistical and case study evidence. But professors Teorell and Hadenius in their well-designed investigation pour a bucket of cold water on this thesis. They demonstrate through a rigorous comprehensive statistical analysis of a worldwide sample of over an 85-year time frame that elections, most likely, do not have a democratizing effect.

The paper is a model of scholarship in its conceptual clarity, theoretical sophistication, and empirical thoroughness. The authors are very systematic in designing their investigation and careful and insightful in interpreting their empirical results. They are especially strong in drawing conclusions from their null findings, moving from more specific, noncontroversial points to a reflection on institutions and their causal effect in general. We recommend the paper to all members of the Comparative Democratization section and hope that it will soon appear in print!

2007 Award Winners

The 2007 best book award was awarded to Beatriz Magaloni (Stanford University) for her book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and Its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Jillian Schwedler (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) for her book, Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen (Cambridge University Press, 2006). Committe Chair Frances Hagopian (University of Notre Dame) presented the award. Other committee members were Dennis Galvan (University of Oregon) and Benjamin Smith (University of Florida).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winners
The Organized Section on Comparative Democratization of the American Political Science Association has selected two co-winners of the award for the best book on comparative democratization published in 2006:

Beatriz Magaloni (Stanford University) for her book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and Its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Jillian Schwedler (University of Maryland) for her book, Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

The Committee carefully considered thirty-one wonderful pieces of scholarship about democracy and democratization around the world. We thank all the authors and their publishers for the opportunity to read and learn from them. In this exceptionally strong pool, these two books stood out for the scope of their ambition – both took nearly a decade to research and write; for engaging big, important, comparative themes in specific contexts about which the authors have deep knowledge; and for the intelligence and care with which they were written.

Beatriz Magaloni’s Voting for Autocracy is a huge book about how the most successful authoritarian regime of the twentieth century – that of the Mexican PRI – maintained power for so long, and why it lost its grip and democratization ensued. To address this question, it brings theoretical precision and smart and multiple methods to bear on impressive original datasets gathered over the course of many years. This work breaks new theoretical ground about virtually every aspect of democratization – regime stability and change, the nature of “hybrid” regimes, the macroeconomics and micropolitics of clientelism, and voter choice and mass coordination dilemmas. It may also be considered the definitive work on Mexican politics. The Committee warmly congratulates Professor Magaloni on this truly impressive accomplishment.

Jillian Schwedler’s Faith in Moderation (a great title for a great book) tackles some of the truly important questions in the world today, “Do Islamist political parties threaten emerging democratic processes?” and “Does inclusion engender moderation and tolerance?” The author elegantly dissects these questions into their component propositions, and methodically addresses the inclusion-moderation thesis through detailed case studies of the Islamic Action Front party in Jordan, which did become more moderate in orientation as a result of participation in democratic processes, and the Islah party in Yemen, which did not. Drawing from years of fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, Schwedler explains these divergent outcomes by opening the black box of actors, narratives, and identity politics within organizations and between organizations and regimes to illuminate the boundaries of what each party could justify on ideological grounds. This work is also notable for taking on the transitions literature and placing Mideast politics back in comparative politics. A superb piece of work, the committee warmly congratulates Professor Schwedler on an outstanding and important piece of scholarship.


Juan Linz Dissertation Award: The Juan Linz Dissertation Award was presented to Susan Hyde for her dissertation, “Observing Norms: Explaining the Causes and Consequences of Internationally Monitored Elections.” Her dissertation advisor was David A. Lake (University of California, San Diego). Committee Chair Marc Morjé Howard (Georgetown University) presented the award. The other committee members included Michael Bernhard (Penn State University) and Kenneth Roberts (Cornell University).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winner:
The committee agreed to award the 2007 Juan Linz Dissertation Prize in the Comparative Study of Democracy to Susan Hyde of Yale University.

Dr. Hyde received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, San Diego in 2006. Her dissertation is entitled “Observing Norms: Explaining the Causes and Consequences of Internationally Monitored Elections.” Hyde’s dissertation was chaired by Professor David A. Lake. The other members of her committee were Professor Gary W. Cox, Clark C. Gibson, Kristian S. Gleditsch, Peter Gourevitch, and Carlos H. Waisman.

Hyde’s dissertation explores the rise of international election monitoring in countries that hold regular elections without necessarily being democratic. She documents how this norm of observation, which emerged on a limited basis in the 1960s, has become increasingly widespread since the 1990s. Hyde argues that the initial impetus for election monitoring came from domestic leaders who sought to demonstrate to the international community that they were committed to democratization. But over time, she shows, even the most autocratic leaders began to request international observers as a means of appearing to be democratic, while simultaneously attempting—often with considerable success—to undermine the democratic process by manipulating the electoral results. This remarkable and rapid change in the norm and practice of international election monitoring has significant consequences for the future of democratization throughout the world.

In addition to being substantively important and interesting, Hyde’s dissertation is methodologically rich and innovative. She develops a formal model of incumbent decision-making, yielding hypotheses that she then tests with several cross-national datasets. She also presents the results of two original field experiments: one conducted in Indonesia during the 2004 presidential elections, the other during Armenia’s 2003 presidential elections. Finally, she also bridges subfields by bringing together substantive questions that are important in both comparative politics and international relations. Overall, Hyde’s dissertation makes important theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions to the study of comparative democratization.


Best Article Award: Richard Snyder (Brown University) won the Best Article Award for "Does Lootable Wealth Breed Disorder: A Political Economy of Extraction Framework?" which appeared in the October 2006 Comparative Political Studies. Daniel Brinks and Michael Coppedge also received an honorable mention for their article “Diffusion is No Illusion: Neighbor Emulation in the Third Wave of Democracy,” which appeared in the May 2006 Comparative Political Studies. Committee Chair Lucan Way (University of Toronto) presented the award. Other committee members were Staffan Lindberg (University of Florida) and Donna Lee Van Cott (Tulane University).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winners
It is a great pleasure to announce the award for the best article in the field of comparative democratization. This award is based on a comprehensive review of all articles on democratization published in 2006 that was carried out by myself, Staffan Lindberg, and Donna Lee Van Cott. This was a difficult task. There were a lot of very good articles.

We first want to recognize for an honorable mention Daniel Brinks and Michael Coppedge’s “Diffusion is No Illusion: Neighbor Emulation in the Third Wave of Democracy.” This article addresses an important mechanism of democratization that has often been hinted at but rarely demonstrated in a methodologically sophisticated manner. Thus, Brinks and Coppedge show that the degree of democracy found among a country’s neighbors has an important impact on the success of democracy, even when we control for other factors such as levels of development. This article provides an important contribution to a key debate in regime studies.

In addition, it is a particular pleasure to present the award for best article to Richard Snyder for his article “Does Lootable Wealth Breed Disorder: A Political Economy of Extraction Framework?” Now this choice for an award in the field of comparative democratization requires some explanation because the article barely mentions the word democracy.

This article focuses on the sources of political order in economies dominated by lootable resources that often fuel civil war.

In this article, Snyder lays out a compelling typology of institutions of extraction or the interaction between political leaders and economies rooted in lootable resources such as diamonds and drugs. He argues that different institutions of extraction strongly affect the ability of leaders to create stable political order.

He shows that the dominance of lootable resources does not always generate disorder as often assumed but in many cases fuel stability, although quite undemocratic stability.

In particular, Snyder focuses on what he calls “joint extraction,” which refers to cooperation between private and public actors who share income often associated by illicit activities.

Leaders provide protection for internationally illegal activity, such as drug trade -- in exchange for access to resources. Such arrangements have provided an important source of stability for rogue regimes including Burma and Sierra Leone.

The breakdown of such arrangements often leads to instability, as occurred when arrangements between Lebanese diamond traders and the autocratic government in Sierra Leone broke down in the 1980s, thus fueling civil war.

The article provides both a novel theory as well as compelling case studies of Sierra Leone and Burma.

Now the problems of political order and lootable wealth have been almost exclusively examined by specialists in international relations. But this issue is also important for regime studies. For many countries in the world, countries that have enormous importance for global security, the central regime question is not whether or not there are free and fair elections but instead whether there exists any form of political order. Snyder’s work challenges us in a compelling way to expand the range of questions covered in regime studies. As Snyder shows, patrimonial dictatorship is often a successful outcome. (Something that we seem to be learning in Iraq). As Snyder’s work has demonstrated, we need to look beyond the question of whether or not a country is democratic or authoritarian.

Authoritarian regimes---chaosocracy in Sierra Leone and totalitarianism in North Korea---are often as different from each other as authoritarian regimes are different from democracies. This is Snyder’s first contribution.

Another major, but certainly not last, contribution of this article is his conceptualization of the interaction between state and economic actors and his exploration of how that interaction shapes regime outcomes. This begins to address a major hole in the field of regime studies.

Almost forty years after the publication of Lipset’s Political Man, for example, we still have only a vague understanding of how and why economic development promotes democracy. A lot of work has been done showing correlations, but relatively little work showing causal mechanisms. Snyder’s typology of institutions of extraction should be an inspiration for work in other areas of regime studies.

In sum, it is a true pleasure to give this award to Richard Snyder for a groundbreaking article in the true sense of the word. This is the kind of article that will not simply generate another hypothesis but may create whole fields investigation previously ignored.


Best Field Research Award: The Best Field Research Award was presented to Marc Berenson (University of Sussex) for his ground breaking dissertation, titled “Recreating the State: Governance and Power in Poland and Russia.” Committee Chair Milada Anna Vachudova (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) presented the award. Other committee members were Lily Tsai (MIT) and Sherrie Baver (CUNY/City College of New York).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winners
The committee is delighted to announce that the recipient of the 2007 Best Dissertation Field Work Award is Marc Berenson. His ground breaking dissertation, titled “Recreating the State: Governance and Power in Poland and Russia,” asks why some transitional states are more effective in administering policy than others. The central finding is that the level of governance on the ground is higher in Poland than in Russia, despite Russia's profile as a strong state. Poland has performed better due to a mix of Weberian bureaucratic rationalism on the part of the state and of healthier state-society relations that are characterized by societal trust in the state itself instead of by fear of the state's coercive measures. The committee was impressed with the outstanding multi-method fieldwork accomplished by Dr. Berenson.

It included gathering extensive data on tax collection in Russia and Poland; designing and administering surveys on tax compliance; recruiting "confederate petitioners" to request and then evaluate assistance from social service agencies; and interviewing officials, experts and bureaucrats. Dr. Berenson received his PhD at Princeton University, and has taken up a post at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. During the 2007-2008 academic year, he is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.


Best Convention Paper Award: Kenneth Greene (University of Texas at Austin) won the Best Convention Paper Award for his paper on “Authoritarian Regimes in Comparative Perspective.” Committee Chair Joseph Klesner (Kenyon College) presented the award. Other committee members included Jason Brownlee (University of Texas at Austin) and Steven Heydemann (Georgetown University).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winners
The selection committee agreed that the Best Paper given at a Comparative Democratization panel at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association is by Kenneth F. Greene of the University of Texas at Austin. Greene’s “A Resource Theory of Single-Party Dominance,” given on Panel 44-30: Authoritarian Regimes in Comparative Perspective, is superb example of research, combining a question that has been important to comparative politics for decades, a variety of survey instruments, empirical and formal models, case studies, and a clear presentation. He triangulates a wide range of methods on his puzzle – “Why do dominant parties persist in power for decades and under what conditions do challengers expand enough to beat them at the polls, transforming these systems into fully competitive democracies?” – and puts it all together in a very accessible final product. Based on a detailed case study of Mexico and comparative evidence from Italy and Malaysia, the research he shares in this paper includes a formal model that shows how asymmetric access to resources forces challengers to dominant parties to take non-centrist positions and become under-competitive. He tests his theory with survey data he gathered from party elites in Mexico and extends the argument with comparative evidence from Malaysia and Italy, which demonstrate both the continuation of dominance in the former and the end of dominance in the latter. All in all, this paper was a tour de force, combining field research, formal and statistical models, and carefully chosen case studies.


2006 Award Winners

The 2006 best book award was awarded to M. Steven Fish (University of California at Berkeley) for his study of the failure of democratization in post-communist Russia, Democracy Derailed in Russia (CUP, 2005). Committee chair Andreas Schedler (CIDE) presented the award. Other committee members were Doh Shin (University of Missouri) and Anna Gryzmala-Busse (University of Michigan).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winner
The Organized Section on Comparative Democratization of the American Political Science Organization has decided to grant the award for the best book on comparative democratization published in 2005 to M. Steven Fish from the University of California at Berkeley for his book Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics (Cambridge University Press).

The award committee chose the book for the commendable conceptual, theoretical, and methodological care and clarity it displays in explaining the political trajectory of modern Russia.

Fish argues that contemporary Russia cannot be regarded a democratic regime, despite the holding of regular multiparty elections. To establish this controversial initial claim, he goes to considerable length to document violations of democratic norms, such as election fraud, voter coercion, and the exclusion of parties and candidates, that have been observed regularly in Russian national and local elections since the mid 1990s. As his insightful discussion shows, framing our empirical research and defining the very puzzles that animate it depends on careful conceptualization and close knowledge of our objects of study.

As he proceeds from the conceptualization and classification of his case to its explanation, Fish delivers an admirable instance of a methodological species that is still rare and under-developed in comparative politics: an embedded case study. His explanatory reconstruction of the regime trajectory of a single country, Russia, is systematically embedded in the statistical examination of available cross-national evidence (worldwide as well as regional).

With his methodologically transparent and self-conscious framework, large-N explorations establish patterns of co-variation between theoretically meaningful variables. As he finds, neither the level of socio-economic development nor religion nor political culture are to blame for “Russia’s Quandary.” Instead, he argues, the key variables that explain the “failure of open politics” in Russia are corruption fuelled by natural riches (petroleum and natural gas); the stagnation of liberalizing economic reform; and the constitutional concentration of power in the hands of the executive. In establishing his causal claims, Fish combines his in-depth knowledge of Russian politics with further statistical data that allow to situate the Russian republic in comparative perspective.

In addition to its methodological innovativeness and theoretical reflexiveness, the book, we would like to add, also provides considerable aesthetic pleasures. It is delightfully written, with touches of humour we do not find too often in serious comparative research.

All in all, we extend our warmest congratulations to the deserving winner!


Juan Linz Dissertation Award: Mieczyslaw Boduszynski(University of California at Berkeley) won the 2006 Juan Linz Dissertation Award for his dissertation “Explaining Post-Communist Diversity: Regime Change in the Yugoslav Successor States, 1990-2004.” Fabrice Lehoucq (CIDE) presented the award to Mr. Boduszynski. The other committee members included Nancy Bermeo (Princeton University), who chaired the committee, and Marc Morjé Howard (Georgetown University).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winner
The committee agreed to award the 2006 Juan Linz Dissertation Prize in the Comparative Study of Democratization to Mieczyslaw Pawel Boduszynski.

Dr. Boduszynski received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. His dissertation is entitled “Explaining Post-Communist Diversity: Regime Change in the Yugoslav Successor States, 1990-2004.” Boduszynski's dissertation was chaired by Professor Andrew C. Janos. The other members of his committee were Professor George W. Breslauer, Steven K. Vogel, and John Connelly.

Boduszynski's dissertation explains the divergent trajectories of post-communist states in Eastern and Central Europe after 1989. He focuses on Slovenia, which became a “substantive democracy,” Croatia, which became a “simulated democracy,” Serbia-Montenegro, which became a “populist authoritarian regime,” and Macedonia, which became an “illegitimate democracy.” The author argues that initial economic conditions and modes of accommodation and resistance to Western efforts to transfer liberal norms shaped the political trajectories of these countries.

The committee decided to make Dr. Boduszynski's thesis the recipient of the 2006 Juan Linz Dissertation Award for two reasons. First, this dissertation artfully combines the use of a large number of interviews, local and international newspapers, survey data, and secondary sources to explain developments in four former republics of Yugoslavia. Second, it marshals this evidence to analyze the interaction between choices made by public officials, citizens, and Western governments and prevailing and evolving economic and political conditions to account for why rather different regimes emerged in these republics. Boduszynski's dissertation is, in other words, a wonderful example of the sort of the historical and path-contingent research that Juan Linz pioneered in his professional life.

Juan Linz congratulated the winner and made a few remarks, recalling particular issues and debates about democratization relating to Yugoslavia.


Best Article Award: Lucan Way (University of Toronto) won the award for the best article published on comparative democratization in 2005 for his article, “Authoritarian Statebuilding and the Sources of Regime Competitiveness in the Fourth Wave,” which appeared in the January 2005 World Politics. Committee chair Lisa Baldez (Dartmouth College) presented the award. Other committee members were Michele Penner Angrist (Union College) and Laurence Whitehead (Oxford University – Nuffield College).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winner
The winner of the Best Article Award this year goes to Lucan Way, for “Authoritarian State Building and the Sources of Regime Competitiveness in the Fourth Wave: The Cases of Belarus, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine,” which appeared in the January 2005 World Politics.

The article addresses two central questions: first, why did these four countries go from open to closed in the 1990s, and second, what explains variations in the level of competitiveness among them? Way demonstrates persuasively that variations across the four cases cannot be explained by transitions literature. He develops a new approach that emphasizes two main explanatory variables: incumbent capacity and strength of national identity that can be framed in anti-incumbent terms. To paraphrase (somewhat glibly): incumbents have little control of state institutions in the wake of dissolution of the previous regimes, but they figure it out over time, and nationalism taps into the kinds of emotions that facilitate mobilization to a far greater extent than calls of “let's privatize!” This article constitutes a “fundamental rethinking of the transition process.” He even invokes the name of this organized section as evidence of the overly hopeful and analytically misleading assumptions on which democracy promotion is built.

Indeed. At points the argument reads like a how-to manual for burgeoning authoritarians, with statements such as “Leaders must be able to keep allies in line” and “In an international environment that demands at least nominal adherence to democratic procedures, autocrats must be able to rig elections as well as intimidate the opposition, control the media and prevent economic actors from supporting rival forces.” We suspect that the appearance of this article generated a big jump in World Politics subscriptions from countries like Venezuela and Bolivia. We wonder if USAID and Freedom House thought about canceling their subscriptions when they read the piece.

We found Way’s article distinctive for its theoretical significance, empirical detail and strong writing. The fieldwork is both broad and deep. We like the strategy of including one big country and three smaller but very significant ones. The quotes from extensive interviews contain revealing comments from political officials, evidence of skill and finesse on his part. Way writes extremely well and in a way that suggests an arid sense of humor. In one example, he lists a series of actions such as bombing parliament, shutting down TV stations, threatening to imprison anyone who “slanders” incumbents, and then states that “such actions suggest that it is unlikely that democratic values account for the extensive political competition in these countries in the early 1990s.”

A note on methodology might prove helpful to future committees. We considered a wide range of articles, including all the 2005 articles listed in the section’s newsletters, approximately 10 articles nominated for the prize, and relevant articles that appeared in Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, World Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, APSR, AJPS and Perspectives on Politics. We did not define a metric for comparing quality a priori; each committee member developed her own criteria.


Best Field Research Award: The 2006 award for best dissertation fieldwork was awarded to two co-receipients:
Manal Jamal (McGill University) for her dissertation, “After the Peace Processes: Foreign Donor Assistance and the Political Economy of Marginalization in Palestine and El Salvador,” chaired by Juliet Johnson (McGill).

Anupma Kulkarni (Stanford University) for her dissertation, “Demons and Demos: Violence, Memory and Citizenship in Post-Conflict States,” chaired by Terry Karl (Stanford).

Committee chair Leslie Anderson (University of Florida) presented the award. Other committee members were Milada Anna Vachudova (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and Lucan Way (University of Toronto).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winners
The co-winners of the Best Field Work Award were Dr. Manal Jamal and Dr. Anu Kulkarni. Dr. Jamal is a new PhD graduate of McGill University whose dissertation is entitled "After the Peace Processes: Foreign Donor Assistance and the Political Economy of Marginalization in Palestine and El Salvador," chaired by Dr. Juliette Johnson. For her field work Dr. Jamal did 130 interviews in Arabic and Spanish focusing upon the role of NGOs in the process of democratization. Dr. Kulkarni is a new PhD graduate of Stanford University whose dissertation is entitled "Demons and Demos: Violence, Memory and Citizenship in Post Conflict States," chaired by Dr. Terry Karl. Dr. Kulkarni did interviews with victims and perpetrators of human rights violence in the areas of South Africa known as KwaZuluNatal and the Western Cape.


Best Convention Paper Award: Marc Morjé Howard (Georgetown University) and Phillip Roessler (University of Maryland) won the award for best convention paper for their paper “Liberalizing Electoral Outcomes in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes,” which has subsequently been published in AJPS. Committee chair Kirk Bowman (Georgia Institute of Technology) presented the award. Other committee members were Gabriella Montinola (University of California, Davis) and Arang Keshavarzian (Concordia University).

Committee’s Remarks on the Award Winners
Marc Howard and Philip Roessler’s “Liberalizing Electoral Outcomes in Competitive Electoral Regimes” significantly advances the important sub-field of hybrid regimes. The authors both engage in a typological and conceptual discussion of how to conceptualize what they call “competitive authoritarianism” and study how at certain points elections under these authoritarian regimes may trigger a liberalizing break, a concept they call the liberalizing electoral outcome. The authors use quantitative research methods to compare the explanatory power of competing hypotheses and a powerful case study of Kenya to illuminate the causal mechanisms. The result is a well-written, innovative, and compelling argument that represents a major contribution to the comparative democratization literature and a model for our students and ourselves of targeting multiple methods on our research questions.


2005 Award Winners

Juan Linz award for the best dissertation in the comparative study of democratization
The first Juan Linz award went to Staffan Lindberg of Kent State University (Ph.D., University of Lund, Sweden) for his dissertation, “The Power of Elections.” Runner-up for the award was Gulnaz Sharafutdinova (Ph.D., George Washington University, now at Miami University of Ohio), for her dissertation, “The Dynamics of Postcommunist Transformation: Varieties of Authoritarian Regimes and Paradoxes of Crony Capitalism in Russia’s Regions.” Incoming section chair Jonathan Hartlyn (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) chaired the committee and presented the award. The two other committee members were Richard Snyder (Brown University) and Kathleen Collins (University of Notre Dame).

Best Book Award
The award for best book on comparative democratization was shared by Charles Tilly for his book, Social Movements: 1768-2004 (Paradigm, 2004) and Kurt Schock for his book, Unarmed Insurrections: People Power Movements in Nondemocracies (University of Minnesota, 2004). The award was presented by the best book committee chair Steven Fish (University of California at Berkeley). The other members of the committee were Wendy Hunter (University of Texas, Austin) and William Case (Griffith University, Australia).

Best Article Award
Best article committee chair Ellen Lust Okar (Yale) presented the best article award to Lisa Baldez (Dartmouth College) for her article, “Elected Bodies: The Gender Quota Law for Elective Bodies in Mexico,” Legislative Studies Quarterly (May 2004). The other committee members were Tim Frye (Ohio State) and Mark Jones (Rice University).

Best Field Work Award
The award for best field work went to Lilly Tsai (Ph.D., Harvard, now at MIT), for her dissertation, “The Informal State: Government, Accountability and Public Goods Provision in Rural China.” Joe Klesner (Kenyon College) chaired the committee, and fellow committee members Tim Sisk (University of Denver) and Claudia Dahlerus (Albion College) presented the award.


2004 Award Winners

Best Book Award
The award for best book on comparative democratization was presented to Nancy Bermeo for her book, Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2003). Richard Vengroff (University of Connecticut) chaired the panel and presented the award. The other members of the panel were Sharon Wolchik (George Washington University) and Shaheen Mozaffar (Bridgewater State College).

Best Article Award
The section's award for best article was presented to Quan Li (Pennsylvania State University) and Rafael Reuveny (Indiana University) for "Economic Globalization and Democracy: An Empirical Analysis." Valerie Bunce (Cornell University, committee chair), who presented the award, worked with Joseph Klesner (Kenyon College, and Gretchen Casper (Pennsylvania State University) on the selection panel.

Best Field Work Award
The prize for best field work was awarded for the first time this year, in an effort to reward and encourage graduate students to undertake field work. The selection committee included Nancy Bermeo (Princeton University, chair), Michael Foley (Catholic University of America) and Mike Hanshard (Northwestern University). Emilia Gioreva, a Ph.D. candidate from the University of Florida supervised by Leslie Anderson, earned the award for field work on rural women in Bulgaria and Ecuador.


2003 Award Winners

Best Book Award
The award for best book on comparative democratization was presented to Susan Stokes (University of Chicago) for her book Mandates and Democracies: Neoliberalism by Surprise in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and James Mahoney (Brown University) for his book Legacies of Liberalism: Path Dependence and Political Regimes in Central America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). The selection committee included Gretchen Casper (Pennsylvania State University, chair), Michael Foley (Catholic University of America), and Abdeslam Maghraoui (Princeton University).

Best Article Award

The prize for best article was presented to Anirudh Krishna (Duke University) for his article "Enhancing Political Participation in Democracies: What Is the Role of Social Capital?" which appeared in the May 2002 Comparative Political Studies. The selection committee included Nicolas van de Walle (Michigan State University, chair), Eva Bellin (Hunter College), Valerie Bunce (Cornell University), and Eric Thun (Princeton University).


2002 Award Winners

Best Paper Award

The prize for best paper presented at the 2001 American Political Science Association's annual meeting was awarded to Michael McFaul (Stanford University) for his paper "The Fourth Wave of Democracy and Dictatorship: Noncooperative Transitions in the Postcommunist World," which was published in the January 2002 World Politics. Atul Kohli (Princeton University) served as the selection committee.