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.

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.

Learn more about the Frank L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award.

The APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award has been established to honor Lowi’s distinctive contributions to the study of politics. Throughout a prolific and influential career, Lowi developed new understandings of the relationship of public policy to politics, the influence of institutional arrangements to the exercise of power, the role of ideology in the development of political parties, the relationship of democracy to law, the relevance of concept analysis for theory building, and more.

The Lowi Award recognizes the author of a first book in any field of political science that exemplifies qualities of broad ambition, high originality, and intellectual daring, showing promise of having a substantive impact on the overall discipline, regardless of method, specific focus of inquiry or approach to subject. The award carries a cash prize of $750.00.

APSA and IPSA will administer and fund the Lowi Award in alternating years. IPSA will award it at the 2018 IPSA World Congress of Political Science.

For questions about the Lowi Award, please contact awards@apsanet.org.

Margaret Peters is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at UCLA. Her research focuses broadly on international political economy with a special focus on the politics of migration. Her book, Trading Barriers: Immigration and the Remaking of Globalization (2017, Princeton University Press) examines the relationship between trade policy, outsourcing, and immigration policy and received the Best Book Award from the IPE and Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Sections of the International Studies Associations and the Migration and Citizenship Section of APSA. Prior to coming to UCLA, she was an Assistant Professor in the Political Science department at Yale University and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2011. Her work has appeared in International Organization and World Politics, among others. She teaches classes on international political economy and migration and occasionally tweets @MigrationNerd.

The Award Committee was unanimous in its decision to award the Theodore J. Lowi ‘First Book Award’ for 2018 to Margaret Peters.  Dr. Peters is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at UCLA.  Her research focuses broadly on international political economy with a special focus on the politics of migration.  Prior to coming to UCLA, she was an Assistant Professor in the Political Science department at Yale University and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  She earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2011.  Her work has appeared in International Organization and World Politics, among others.

Her first book, Trading Barriers: Immigration and the Remaking of Globalization (2017, Princeton University Press) examines the relationship between trade policy, outsourcing, and immigration policy, demonstrating the important and influential role played by international trade and capital movements in shaping public policies toward immigration.  An exhaustively researched and original analysis, with broad international policy implications, Trading Barriers illuminates our understanding of the relationship between trade liberalization and immigration policies.

Learn more about the Theodore J. Lowi Award.

 

The Gladys M. Kammerer Award is given annually for the best book published during the previous calendar year in the field of U.S. national policy.  It carries a prize of $1,000.

MARK SPINDEL
POTOMAC RIVER CAPITAL LLC

In 2007, Mr. Spindel launched Potomac River Capital LLC, a Washington-based, registered investment adviser. His firm specialized in managing global macro hedge funds with a specific focus on the intersection of macro-economics, central bank policy and capital markets. The firm’s assets peaked near $800m and after a decade has been wound down to focus on personal investments, economic policy and political analysis.

Prior to launching Potomac River, Mr. Spindel spent nearly ten years at the World Bank where he was Deputy Treasurer and CIO of the International Finance Corporation managing $15bn in reserves. Mr. Spindel was simultaneously a member of the Board of Trustees of the World Bank’s $14bn pension fund where he helped oversee strategic asset allocation across all investment classes. Before the World Bank, Mr. Spindel helped establish ABN AMRO’s UK Asset Management company and prior to that, began his career at Salomon Brothers where he was ultimately a senior portfolio manager in their asset management subsidiary.

Mr. Spindel continues to advise pension funds, financial institutions, hedge funds and central banks on a variety of investment, asset-liability and quantitative risk management issues. He is among the most experienced investors in inflation-linked bonds and speaks regularly on portfolio management issues. His research on the Federal Reserve has culminated in his award-winning book with Professor Sarah Binder (George Washington University / Brookings) about the relationship between Congress and the Fed (The Myth of Independence, Princeton University Press, 2017).

He received his BS degree from Cornell University in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering (1987).

In The Myth of Independence, Sarah Binder and Mark Spindel have crafted a foundational work for understanding the history and politics of the Federal Reserve, one that unveils the compelling tensions between economics and politics and between independence and public accountability. They skillfully illuminate how and why members of Congress have paid attention to the Federal Reserve, and to what extent they have shaped its architecture and behavior. The heartbeat of American prosperity depends on the Fed, but does it reflect the will of the American people in any way? Binder and Spindel demonstrate that Congress has much more influence over the often inscrutable Fed than conventional wisdom allows. Employing a rich set of methodological tools ranging from archival research to data analysis of congressional voting, the authors demonstrate the connections between legislative efforts to regulate the Fed’s discretion and transparency and the performance of the nation’s economy. Beautifully written, this book ultimately captures the extent to which the Fed and Congress are interdependent institutions. Few authors could make such a complex subject so compelling, accessible, and engaging.

Donate to the Gladys M. Kammerer Award Fund.

The Gladys M. Kammerer Award is given annually for the best book published during the previous calendar year in the field of U.S. national policy. It carries a prize of $1,000.

Sarah Binder is a professor of political science at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, specializing in Congress and legislative politics. She received her B.A. from Yale University in 1986 and her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Minnesota in 1995, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015.

In addition to articles in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science and elsewhere, she is author or co-author of five books on Congress, including her most recent book with Mark Spindel, The Myth of Independence: How Congress Governs the Federal Reserve (Princeton University Press 2017). The Myth of Independence was awarded the Richard F. Fenno Prize for the best book published in legislative politics in 2017 and the Gladys Kammerer Award for the best book published in 2017 on U.S. national policy. Her earlier books include Minority Rights, Majority Rule: Partisanship and the Development of Congress (Cambridge University Press 1997); with Steven S. Smith, Politics or Principle? Filibustering in the United States Senate (Brookings Institution Press 1997); Stalemate: Causes and Consequences of Legislative Gridlock (Brookings Institution Press, 2003) (awarded the Richard F. Fenno Jr. Prize) and with Forrest Maltzman, Advice and Dissent: The Struggle to Shape the Federal Judiciary (Brookings Institution Press 2009).

Binder is also an associate editor of The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog and a former co-editor of Legislative Studies Quarterly.

In The Myth of Independence, Sarah Binder and Mark Spindel have crafted a foundational work for understanding the history and politics of the Federal Reserve, one that unveils the compelling tensions between economics and politics and between independence and public accountability. They skillfully illuminate how and why members of Congress have paid attention to the Federal Reserve, and to what extent they have shaped its architecture and behavior. The heartbeat of American prosperity depends on the Fed, but does it reflect the will of the American people in any way? Binder and Spindel demonstrate that Congress has much more influence over the often inscrutable Fed than conventional wisdom allows. Employing a rich set of methodological tools ranging from archival research to data analysis of congressional voting, the authors demonstrate the connections between legislative efforts to regulate the Fed’s discretion and transparency and the performance of the nation’s economy. Beautifully written, this book ultimately captures the extent to which the Fed and Congress are interdependent institutions. Few authors could make such a complex subject so compelling, accessible, and engaging.

Donate to the Gladys M. Kammerer Award Fund. 

The Heinz Eulau prize is awarded annually for the best article published in the American Political Science Review and for the best article published in Perspectives on Politics in the calendar year. It carries a prize of $750. Special thanks go to Cambridge University Press for support of the new prize given in 2005, recognizing scholarship in Perspectives on Politics.

In 2004, the APSA Council acted to incorporate the best paper published in Perspectives in Politics under the umbrella of the Heinz Eulau Award, as well as the best paper published in APSR. This action was taken to allow APSA to recognize articles in Perspectives on Politics in a way parallel with APSR, without transgressing a council moratorium on new awards. As we build up award endowment, we expect in the future that the two awards will be separated. To manage the effort involved in selecting best articles for two journals, APSA President Margaret Levi, in consultation with the Award Committee Chair, increased the number of appointees to the Eulau Committee from 3 to 5, and suggested that two members focus on APSR articles and two on Perspectives on Politics articles, with the chair acting as the swing participant and coordinating voice.

Matthew T. Pietryka is an assistant professor of political science at Florida State University. His broad research interests include political behavior, social networks, political communication, and political psychology. His recent work explores how individuals’ locations in their social networks interweave with their geographic locations, creating patterns of segregation and shaping their perceptions of the political world. This work examines how these socially- and geographically-segregated perceptions facilitate the spread of various norms, values, and political preferences.

Pietryka and DeBats’s article leverages the as-yet unmined historical data to analyze the impact of individuals’ social networks on their likelihood to vote and on their partisan choices. The authors reconstruct  voters’ social proximity to elites in 19^th-century statewide and municipal elections in Virginia and Kentucky by pairing newly discovered records of viva voce voting in those elections with archival data from public sources and church memberships, and show that individuals that are more socially proximate to elites are more likely to turn out to vote, and individuals that are more socially proximate to a given political party’s elites are more likely to vote for that party. Pietryka and DeBats’ strategy of analysis allows them to evaluate the network effects on a much broader set of connections than the few most immediate social connections of each individual. The authors also distinguish between the effect on voting participation of individuals who are centrally placed in the network and the effect of social proximity to elites. The former effect is not unequivocally positive and depends on the voting behavior of those central individuals: it is positive if they vote, but negative if they don’t. By contrast, social proximity of individuals to elites consistently encourages voting, by giving individuals more access to political information, reducing their cost of voting, strengthening their sense of political efficacy and putting social pressures on them to vote. Pietryka and DeBats’ analysis of historical datasets bear out their general hypothesis, which is also supported by the analysis of a contemporary dataset on municipal elections in Williamsburg, VA. The article by Pietryka and DeBats constituted an impressive piece of scholarly research, and a worthy winner of the 2018 Eulau Award.

Donate to the Heinz Eulau Award Fund.

The Heinz Eulau prize is awarded annually for the best article published in the American Political Science Review and for the best article published in Perspectives on Politics in the calendar year. It carries a prize of $750. Special thanks go to Cambridge University Press for support of the new prize given in 2005, recognizing scholarship in Perspectives on Politics.

In 2004, the APSA Council acted to incorporate the best paper published in Perspectives in Politics under the umbrella of the Heinz Eulau Award, as well as the best paper published in APSR. This action was taken to allow APSA to recognize articles in Perspectives on Politics in a way parallel with APSR, without transgressing a council moratorium on new awards. As we build up award endowment, we expect in the future that the two awards will be separated. To manage the effort involved in selecting best articles for two journals, APSA President Margaret Levi, in consultation with the Award Committee Chair, increased the number of appointees to the Eulau Committee from 3 to 5, and suggested that two members focus on APSR articles and two on Perspectives on Politics articles, with the chair acting as the swing participant and coordinating voice.

Donald DeBats is Professor and Head of American Studies at Flinders University in Adelaide Australia; he is a Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia and a Residential Fellow at Virginia Humanities. His research work is based around the North American poll books, the official records of the viva voce (by voice) elections of the nineteenth century, and is supported by a Collaborative Research Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. These records hold important keys to the meaning, structure, and outcomes of that long history of American politics from colonial days to the end of the nineteenth century, during which there was no secrecy, elections were conducted in public, and all votes were knowable. This recent work is reflected in his interactive website Voting Viva Voce, Unlocking the Social Logical of Past Politics sociallogic.iath.virginia.edu

Pietryka and DeBats’s article leverages the as-yet unmined historical data to analyze the impact of individuals’ social networks on their likelihood to vote and on their partisan choices. The authors reconstruct  voters’ social proximity to elites in 19^th-century statewide and municipal elections in Virginia and Kentucky by pairing newly discovered records of viva voce voting in those elections with archival data from public sources and church memberships, and show that individuals that are more socially proximate to elites are more likely to turn out to vote, and individuals that are more socially proximate to a given political party’s elites are more likely to vote for that party. Pietryka and DeBats’ strategy of analysis allows them to evaluate the network effects on a much broader set of connections than the few most immediate social connections of each individual.The authors also distinguish between the effect on voting participation of individuals who are centrally placed in the network and the effect of social proximity to elites. The former effect is not unequivocally positive and depends on the voting behavior of those central individuals: it is positive if they vote, but negative if they don’t. By contrast, social proximity of individuals to elites consistently encourages voting, by giving individuals more access to political information, reducing their cost of voting, strengthening their sense of political efficacy and putting social pressures on them to vote. Pietryka and DeBats’ analysis of historical datasets bear out their general hypothesis, which is also supported by the analysis of a contemporary dataset on municipal elections in Williamsburg, VA. The article by Pietryka and DeBats constituted an impressive piece of scholarly research, and a worthy winner of the 2018 Eulau Award.

Donate to the Heinz I. Eulau Fund.