The Victoria Schuck Award is given annually for the best book published on women and politics. It carries a prize of $1,000. Established to honor Victoria Schuck’s life-long commitment to women and politics, this prize recognizes and encourage research and publication in this field. Schuck earned her PhD in 1937 from Stanford University and played a leading role in opening doors for women in the profession. She was not only an outstanding mentor for women, but her service in senior administrative roles at Mt Holyoke College and Mount Vernon College opened doors for future generations of women leaders.

Christina Wolbrecht is professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, where her areas of expertise include American politics, political parties, gender and politics, and American political development. She received her BA from Pacific Lutheran University and her MA and PhD from Washington University in St. Louis. Wolbrecht is the co-author, with J. Kevin Corder, of Counting Women’s Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage Through the New Deal (Cambridge). In this National Science Foundation-supported project, the authors use new data and novel methods to provide insight into whether, how, and with what consequences women cast their ballots in the first five presidential elections following suffrage.

Wolbrecht also is the author of The Politics of Women’s Rights: Parties, Positions, and Change (Princeton), which received the Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award from the Political Organizations and Parties section of the APSA. She has authored or co-authored articles on such topics as women as political role models, the representation of women, and party position-taking on education policy. Wolbrecht and Corder are currently writing a book on the first century of women as voters in the United States. Among numerous service contributions to the discipline and her own institution, Wolbrecht is an editorial board member for Women Also Know Stuff, an initiative to counter implicit bias and promote women scholars in political science.

Donate to the Victoria Schuck Fund.

 

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Related articles: 

• Professor Wolbrecht Talks Importance of Sharing Women Experts
• Professor Wolbrecht on Becoming a Political Scientist

The Woodrow Wilson Award is given annually for the best book on government, politics, or international affairs. The award, formerly supported by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, is sponsored by Princeton University. It carries a cash prize of $5,000.

Eric Schickler is Jeffrey & Ashley McDermott Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of three books which have won the Richard F. Fenno, Jr. Prize for the best book on legislative politics: Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress (2001), Filibuster: Obstruction and Lawmaking in the United States Senate (2006, with Gregory Wawro), and Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power (2016, with Douglas Kriner; also winner of the Richard E. Neustadt Prize for the best book on executive politics).  His book, Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965, was the winner of the Woodrow Wilson Prize for the best book on government, politics or international affairs published in 2016, and is co-winner of the J. David Greenstone Prize for the best book in history and politics from the previous two calendar years. He is also the co-author of Partisan Hearts and Minds, which was published in 2002.

“Political scientists have long been fascinated with explanations for partisan realignment within U.S. politics. A particular episode of realignment involves the emergence and adoption of major civil rights legislation, which most accounts render as having occurred in the 1960s as a belated addition to the Democratic Party’s agenda. This political transformation, typically presented as elite-driven, shattered the Democratic Party coalition between southern conservatives and their more liberal northeastern colleagues, and eventually bolstered the conservative ranks of the GOP, as southern Democrats migrated over to the GOP.

This year’s Woodrow Wilson Prize winner, Eric Schickler, however, provides a compelling and richly detailed case in Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965 that “[l]ong before Goldwater and LBJ made their own distinctive policy statements in the 1960s, their parties had been remade underneath them,” and not by party elites. Schickler employs multiple methods, including historical analysis, and rich archival data to demonstrate convincingly that the mid-1960s civil rights transition was the product of changes starting in the mid-1930s. It was then that a new constituency base—urban blacks as a key voting block for northern liberals—and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) started pressuring Democrats to understand that racial divisions undermined class consciousness. In short, one cannot understand the civil rights realignment in the 1960s without understanding its historical roots in federalism, local urban politics, and the decentralized election of House members, all of which were essential to the eventual, gradual incorporation of civil rights into the national Democrat Party. Put differently, Schickler helps us to understand the potential power of more localized social movements as key to major political and policy change in U.S. politics.

Just as important as the challenge to the conventional wisdom of elite-driven change, Racial Realignment reminds social science scholars once again that there is much to be gained by placing a “premium on a methods approach that integrates historical and behavioral evidence and draws on diverse data sources for evidence,” and conducting analyses across institutions and levels of government. This is because, as Schickler demonstrates, major political change like this happens at the “intersection of multiple institutions and political processes,” not just a single institution or at the behest of a few powerful political interests within a short time frame. The evidence in Racial Realignment also alerts us that we should be wary of using actual policy decisions/outcomes as the main basis for understanding when change occurs because the reality is likely to be that decades of behind the scenes action are critical to understanding change.”

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The Gabriel A. Almond prize is awarded annually for the best dissertation in the field of comparative politics. It carries a prize of $750.

The award was created in recognition of Gabriel Almond’s contributions to the discipline, profession, and Association. He was a long time faculty member at Stanford University and former APSA President (1966). Almond’s scholarly work contributed directly to the development of theory in comparative politics and brought together work on the developing areas and Western Europe that prevented splintering into an array of disparate areas studies.

Jeremy Ferwerda is an assistant professor of Government at Dartmouth College. He received his PhD in Political Science from MIT in September 2015, where his dissertation work was supported by the Social Science Research Council and Harvard University’s Center for European Studies. Before graduate school, he graduated summa cum laude from Cornell University and worked at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co.

Jeremy Ferwerda (PhD, MIT) is the winner of this year’s Gabriel A. Almond Prize for the best dissertation in the field of comparative politics. Ferwerda begins with the observation that European local governments’ discretion over redistributive policy has grown over the past thirty years. Ferwerda discovers that surprisingly decentralized discretion over policy has not led to a “race to the bottom” in social spending as it is commonly argued. Instead, newly empowered local governments exert greater redistributive effort, often raising their own revenue to do so. Ferwerda develops an important argument to make sense of this new finding: local and national redistributive politics differ because of voters’ proximity to politicians and each other. He identifies two channels through which the “politics of proximity” affects redistributive spending. First, voters feel local negative externalities associated with poverty more keenly than national ones. Second, because local electorates are relatively small, politicians’ can swing elections by using redistributive policy to mobilize voters, particularly poor ones. Ferwerda provides impressive and original evidence for his theory using carefully constructed subnational tests with data from Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Belgium, and Sweden. Some of the core findings of Ferwerda’s important dissertation include evidence that support for redistribution, especially amongst the wealthy, is greater in smaller municipalities. He also shows that local governments increase redistributive spending in response to visible disorder and if they raise their own revenue. Additionally, he finds that local politicians who spend on social services and transfers perform better at the ballot box. Finally, he demonstrates that local redistributive spending mobilizes poor voters, as turnout is higher in local elections than national ones in poor municipalities with discretion over social spending. In sum, while the Almond Committee had to choose among some very impressive dissertations, we have selected Ferwerda’s dissertation for its richly theorized and novel empirical findings on a substantively important topic, conducted in a highly empirically rigorous manner, which all together represent a significant contribution to the field of comparative politics and beyond.

Donate to the Gabriel A. Almond Fund.

The Hanes Walton, Jr. Career Award is named in honor of Dr. Hanes Walton Jr., former APSA Vice President (2012-13) and professor of political science at the University of Michigan. Given biennially, this award recognizes a political scientist whose lifetime of distinguished scholarship has made significant contributions to our understanding of racial and ethnic politics and illuminates the conditions under which diversity and intergroup tolerance thrive in democratic societies.

Hanes Walton, Jr. attended and majored in political science at Morehouse College in 1963. He received an MA at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University) and was the first PhD in government at Howard University in 1967. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Pi Sigma Alpha and received several other academic awards and was a life member of APSA.

He was initially employed at Savannah State College, later at Atlanta University and then at University of Michigan. And while at State and Michigan, he researched and published in the areas of race and politics, African politics, regulatory politics, political parties, elections, and political theory.

Out of his research, writing, and publications are books on black politics, Invisible Politics: Black Political Behavior (1985), Political Parties in American Society (2000), Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr (1971), When the Marching Stopped: The Politics of Civil Rights Regulatory Agencies (1988), Presidential Elections, 1789-2008 (2009), and the two volume work, The African American Electorate: A Statistical History (2012). 

Michael C. Dawson is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Dawson received his doctorate degree from Harvard.   He has directed numerous public opinion studies that focus on race and public opinion.  His research interests include black political behavior and public opinion, political economy, and black political ideology.  More recently he has combined his quantitative work with work in political theory.  His first two books, Behind the Mule:  Race and Class in African-American Politics and Black Visions:  The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies, won multiple awards.  Recent books include Not In Our Lifetimes: The Future of Black Politics, and Blacks In and Out of the Left.  Recently with Megan Ming Francis Dawson launched a nationwide, multi-university project to study the intersection of race and capitalism.  Recent work from Dawson related to this project includes the 2016 articles in Public Culture (with Francis), and Critical Historical Studies. He is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago.  Dawson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006.

Donate to the Hanes Walton 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.

Alisha C. Holland is Assistant Professor in the Politics Department at Princeton University. She studies the comparative political economy of development with a focus on urban politics and Latin America. Her first book, Forbearance as Redistribution: The Politics of Informal Welfare in Latin America (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics, 2017) examines the politics of enforcement of laws that the poor tend to violate, such as squatting, street vending, and electricity theft. Her other research interests include social policy, public works, migration, and crime control in Latin America.

Alisha C Holland makes a substantial contribution to comparative politics in her rigorous conceptual work on “Forbearance”, i.e. the voluntary and revocable non-enforcement of legislation, which is often quickly associated with state weakness (and the incapacity of the state to enforce the law) hides a diversity of situations but she argues that it is important to identify the intent of politicians and the implications of their decision not to enforce in order to assess when such a choice amounts to a covert distributive policy in a context where weak welfare provisions bear heavy consequences on the poor, contributing to their resorting to violating the law. The article is original in that it brings together a theoretical argument with a solid empirical demonstration, based on extensive primary research. The work was truly exceptional in that regard. The demonstration is rich and complex but nevertheless presented in a clear and elegant manner. The demonstration draws primarily from Latin American qualitative research but its applicability goes far beyond the area she focuses on, across all the subfields of political science. The article offers a significant contribution to the political science literature by demonstrating the crucial role of comparative analysis supported by thorough conceptual work and a detailed contextual analysis.

Donate to the Heinz I. Eulau Fund.