Ana Catalano Weeks — 2018 Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award Recipient

The American Political Science Association (APSA) will present the Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award to Dr. Ana Catalano Weeks at the 2018 APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition, the world’s largest gathering of political scientists and source for emerging scholarship in the discipline. The $750 award, supported by Pi Sigma Alpha, recognizes the best paper presented at the previous year’s APSA Annual Meeting.

Ana Catalano Weeks is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Comparative Politics in the Department of Politics, Languages, & International Studies at the University of Bath. Before joining Bath, she was a College Fellow in the Department of Government at Harvard University and a Research Fellow in the Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP) at the Harvard Kennedy School. She has a PhD in Political Science from Harvard University, an MSc in Comparative Politics (Europe) from the LSE, and an AB in Government from Dartmouth College. Her research interests include gender and politics, political representation, and political parties, with a regional concentration in Western Europe.

We are pleased to award “Why Are Gender Quota Laws Adopted by Men? The Role of Inter-and Intra-Party Competition,” by Ana Catalano Weeks, as winner of the 2018 Burdette Prize.  The prize committee recognize Weeks’ paper for breaking new ground both theoretically and empirically, and for taking full advantage of the insights generated by previous generations of scholarship on political parties. Weeks’ paper focuses on a puzzle that is of compelling concern for the public and policy-makers: Under what conditions are male party leaders willing to relinquish control over representation and implement gender quotas for candidates?  The paper uncovers two mechanisms that go beyond existing explanations based on beliefs, diffusion, or social movements, and instead highlights the strategic use of quota politics as tools of intra-party and inter-party competition.  The paper’s research design and methods are exemplary, in particularly the careful selection of paired comparative case studies and the rigorous selection and documentation of interview subjects.