Dawn Teele – 2016 Gabriel A. Almond Award Recipient

The Gabriel A. Almond prize is awarded annually for the best dissertation in the field of comparative politics

headshot2Dawn Teele (PhD, Yale University) has written a superb dissertation in “The Logic of Women’s
Enfranchisement: A Comparative Study of the United States, France and the United Kingdom.” At the core of this work is an innovative theory that women won enfranchisement not primarily as a product of ideological change, but as the consequence of pragmatic, sometimes cynical, vote-winning strategies by office-seeking political parties. Thus, we can now understand why left and right-wing parties both embraced, and at other times both rejected, suffrage expansion. Dr. Teele marshals impressive amounts of qualitative and quantitative evidence to demonstrate the plausibility of her case. The committee anticipates that this work, which contributes to the study of democratization, representation and system change, will make for an important book of relevance right across the discipline.

Special thanks to our committee Arthur Spirling (Chair), New York University; Marc Howard, Georgetown University; Lisa Blaydes, Stanford University