The James Madison Award recognizes an American political scientist who has made a distinguished scholarly contribution to political science. The award is made triennially, next in 2017. It includes a $2000 prize, and the recipient delivers a lecture at the APSA Annual Meeting. 

Deborah Stone is currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University, and an Honorary Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University in Denmark. A specialist in health and social policy, she is the author of numerous articles and four books. Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making won the American Political Science Association’s Wildavsky Award for an Enduring Contribution to Policy Studies; it is now in its fourth edition and has been translated into five languages. Her other books include The Disabled State, about the origins and implementation of disability as a policy category; The Limits of Professional Power, a study of the German national health insurance system; and The Samaritan’s Dilemma, a call for harnessing altruism, rather than self-interest, as the moral engine of political life.

From the APSA and its affiliated sections, Stone has also received the 2013 Charles McCoy Career Achievement Award (New Political Science Section); the 2014 Grain of Sand Award (Interpretive Methods Conference Group); the 2000 Miriam K. Mills Award (Policy Studies Organization); a 2000 Mentor Award (Women’s Caucus). Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, appointment as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, a Robert Wood Johnson Individual Investigator Award, an Open Society Individual Project Fellowship, fellowships from Harvard Law School and the Harvard Program on Ethics and the Professions, and a German Marshall Fund Fellowship.

Stone is one of the co-founders and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. In addition to academic publications, she has written for The American Prospect, Nation, New Republic, Boston Review, salon.com, and some natural history magazines. She has served as a consultant to the Social Security Administration, the Institute of Medicine, the Office of Technology Assessment, and the Human Genome Project, and more recently, to The Asia Foundation Nepal, where she helped establish a public policy institute called Niti Foundation.

Stone holds a B.A. in Russian Studies from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT. She has taught politics and public policy at Duke University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Brandeis University, where she held the Pokross Chair in Law and Social Policy until 1999, as well as holding visiting professorships at Aarhus University Yale University, Tulane University, and University of Bremen, Germany.

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The Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha prize is awarded annually for the best paper presented at the previous year’s annual meeting. The award is supported by Pi Sigma Alpha. It carries a prize of $750.

Kenneth F. Greene is an Associate Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin.  His research focuses on authoritarian regimes and political competition in new democracies, with a particular emphasis on Mexico.

His first book, Why Dominant Parties Lose: Mexico’s Democratization in Comparative Perspective (2007), argues that economic privatization threatens the hyper-incumbency advantages dominant parties derive from politicizing public resources.  This project and related papers won the 2008 Best Book Award and the 2007 and 2015 Best Paper Awards from the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association.

Current research centers on vote buying and the quality of elections, arguing that democratic competition undermines political machines’ ability to buy support.

He was Principal Investigator on the Mexico 2012 Panel Study of voters and co-editor of Mexico’s Evolving Democracy (2015).  His articles have appeared in Political Analysis, the American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, PS: Political Science and Politics, Foreign Affairs en Español, and other outlets.  Recently, he spent a year as Santander Chair of Excellence at the Carlos III University and Juan March Institute in Madrid.

He teaches on research methods, political parties, Mexico’s politics, and US-Mexico relations.  Despite assigning a “too much reading!”, he has been recognized with a 2011 Raymond Dickson Teaching Award and a 2009 Liberal Arts Council Teaching Award for undergraduate education at UT-Austin.

He lives in Austin TX with his family, relies excessively on his smarter friends, and takes off Thursday evenings to compete in a weekly bike race.

“We are pleased to announce “”Why Vote Buying Fails: Campaign Effects and the Elusive Swing Voter”” by Kenneth F. Greene of the University of Texas at Austin as our selection as this year’s winner.

In the paper, Professor Greene challenges the conventional wisdom about the power of vote buying and clientelism in Latin American politics, arguing that modern campaigns undercut the utility of vote-buying. When candidates run legitimate democratic campaigns, it makes voters less predictable to vote-buyers, and increases the risks that vote buying will be ineffective. Greene explores whether campaign issues or vote-selling dominates among those who change their mind over the course of the campaign, and finds that vote-buying is far less effective than previously thought. This is good news for democracy.

The committee was impressed by the paper’s methodological sophistication and how the author uses survey experiments to deliver new insights about a topic of enduring interest among those who study elections in emerging democracies. The paper is well-argued and the methods are well-deployed. We believe this paper is well-deserving of the distinction of being this year’s winner of the Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award.”

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The Edward S. Corwin prize is awarded annually for the best dissertation in the field of public law. It carries a prize of $750.

The Corwin award is for the best doctoral dissertation completed and accepted during that year or the previous year in the field of public law, broadly defined to include the judicial process, judicial behavior, judicial biography, courts, law, legal systems, the American constitutional system, civil liberties, or any other substantial area, or any work which deals in a significant fashion with a topic related to or having substantial impact on the American Constitution.

Edward S. Corwin was a former Association president who is nationally known and widely published. He consulted with many other academics as well as politicians involved with constitutional issues, most notably when he publicly supported Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Supreme Court reorganization (“court packing”) plan.

Allison P. Harris is an assistant professor in the Political Science Department at Pennsylvania State University. Her research is in the subfield of American politics with specific focus in the areas of judicial politics, the criminal justice system, state politics, representation, and political methodology.

Allison’s current research program investigates the effect of group-level characteristics on individual criminal court judges’ decisions. Specifically, she finds that as the group of judges comprising the criminal court bench becomes more racially diverse, individual judges are less likely to render incarceration sentences in felony cases with Black defendants. Allison’s other projects address disparities in police traffic stops, changes in public opinion on reparations, and the relationship between redistricting and state-level polarization.

Allison received her doctorate from the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago in 2016, and she spent the 2016-2017 academic year as a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University.

Donate to the Edward S. Corwin Fund.