Best Paper Awards
65th MPSA National Conference
AJPS Best Paper Award, 2007
Tasha S. Philpot, University of Texas at Austin
Hanes Walton, Jr., University of Michigan
One of Our Own: Black Female Candidates and the Voters Who Support Them (Volume 51, Issue1)
Tasha Philpot is assistant professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin. She is affiliated with the Center for African and African American Studies and the Center for Women's and Gender Studies. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Political Behavior, Public Opinion Quarterly, National Political Science Review, and the Journal of Politics. She is the author of Race, Republicans, and the Return of the Party of Lincoln (2007, University of Michigan Press).
Hanes Walton, Jr. is professor of political science and research scientist at the Center for Political Studies in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. His books include African American Power and Politics; The Political Context Variable; Reelection: William J. Clinton as a Native-Son Presidential Candidate; Liberian Politics: The Portrait by African American Diplomat J. Milton Turner; and The African Foreign Policy of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: A Documentary Analysis.
and
Erik Gartzke, University of California, San Diego
The Capitalist Peace (Volume 51, Issue 1)
Erik Gartzke is associate professor of political science and the University of California, San Diego. His research has been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Politics, and World Politics. A recent study by Thompson ISI (“Web of Science”) named Gartzke as one of the 20 most prolific and widely cited scholars in the study of conflict (in a field of 5,311authors).
Award Committee: Errol Henderson, Penn State University; Patrick Kenney, Arizona State University; Laurel Weldon, Purdue University
Best Paper by an Emerging Scholar, 2007
Jason Webb Yackee, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Susan Webb Yackee, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Is Federal Agency Rulemaking “Ossified”? The Effects of Procedural Constraints on Agency Policymaking
Jason Webb Yackee, J.D., Ph.D., is assistant professor of law at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He specializes in administrative law and international law. His research has been published in the Journal of Politics, International Politics, and a variety of law review journals.
Susan Webb Yackee, Ph.D., is assistant professor of public affairs and political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She specializes in bureaucratic politics and the politics of the policymaking process. Her research has been published in, among other outlets, the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Public Management Review, Journal of Politics, and the British Journal of Political Science.
Award Committee: Stephen Nicholson, University of California, Merced (Chair); Lonna Atkeson, University of New Mexico; Barbara Norrander, University of Arizona
Best Paper in International Relations, 2007
Erik Gartzke, University of California, San Diego
Alex Weisiger, Olin Institute for Strategic Studies
Dynamic Difference and the Democratic Peace
Erik Gartzke is associate professor of political science and the University of California, San Diego. His research has been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Politics, and World Politics. A recent study by Thompson ISI (“Web of Science”) named Gartzke as one of the 20 most prolific and widely cited scholars in the study of conflict (in a field of 5,311authors).
Alex Weisiger is a post-doctoral fellow at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. He is a graduate of Columbia University and will be joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in the2008-2009 academic year. His dissertation addresses war termination from a bargaining perspective, focusing in particular on the determinants of war duration and severity.
Award Committee: Nina Tannenwald, Brown University (Chair); Dan Lindley, University of Notre Dame; Sara Mitchell, University of Iowa
Herbert Simon Award, 2007
John Scholz, Eppes Professor of Political Science and Courtesy Professor of Law, Florida State University
John Scholz's work on environmental and tax compliance appears in the leading journals in political science and law, such as the American Journal of Political Science and Law and Contemporary Problems, and his books include Adaptive Governance and Water Conflicts (editor, with Bruce Stiftel) (Resources for the Future 2005); Taxpayer Compliance: An Agenda for Research: A National Academy of Sciences Report (with Jeffrey A. Roth and Ann Dryden Witte) (University of Pennsylvania Press 1989); and Taxpayer Compliance: Social Science Perspectives (editor, with Jeffrey A. Roth) (University of Pennsylvania Press 1989). Prior to joining Florida State University in 2001, Scholz taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Scholz (above right) is pictured presenting the Herbert Simon Lecture at the 65th MPSA National Conference in April 2008.
Award Committee: Sanford C. Gordon, New York University (Chair); Lael R. Keiser, University of Missouri, Columbia; Charles R. Shipan, University of Michigan
Kellogg/Notre Dame Award, 2007
Mark Copelovitch, University of Wisconsin at Madison
David Andrew Singer, MIT
Financial Regulation, Monetary Policy, and Inflation in the Industrialized World
Mark Copelovitch is assistant professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. His research interests include international financial institutions, the effect of international capital flows on national economic policies, the political economy of monetary institutions (exchange rates and central banking), and the interaction between domestic politics and international cooperation. Copelovitch is currently working on a book entitled Banks, Bonds, and Bailouts: The International Monetary Fund in the Global Economy, which seeks to explain the substantial variation in the IMF's lending policies over the last two decades.
David Andrew Singer is assistant professor of political science at MIT. He is the author of Regulating Capital: Setting Standards for the International Financial System (Cornell University Press, 2007) as well as articles in (or forthcoming in) International Organization, Journal of Politics, and International Studies Quarterly. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.
Award Committee: Duane Swank, Marquette University (Chair); Catherine Boone, University of Texas, Austin; Rafaela Dancygier, Princeton University
Citation: Copelovitch and Singer make an important contribution to the comparative political economy of monetary policy. The authors show that central banks can be divided into two types: banks that have mandates for price stability only and banks that are responsible for both price stability and bank regulation. These types in turn affect variation in inflation outcomes. Drawing on quantitative cross-country evidence as well as on a case study of the Bank of England, the authors find that banks vested with bank regulatory responsibilities produce higher inflation rates than their single-mandate counterparts, conditional on exchange rate regimes. Copelovitch and Singer thus advance our understanding of the structures of monetary institutions and how these affect important policy outcomes.
Lucius Barker Award, Best Paper Investigating Race or Ethnicity and Politics Honoring the Spirit and Work of Professor Barker, 2007
Julie Novkov, University at Albany, SUNY
Toward a Legal Genealogy of Colorblindness
Julie Novkov is associate professor of political science and women’s studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. Novkov is the author of Racial Union: Law, Intimacy, and the White State in Alabama, 1865-1954 (University of Michigan Press 2008) and Constituting Workers, Protecting Women: Gender, Law, and Labor in the Progressive Era and New Deal Years (University of Michigan Press 2001). She is co-editor of Race and American Political Development with Joseph Lowndes and Dorian Warren (Routledge, forthcoming 2008) and Security Disarmed: Critical Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Militarization with Barbara Sutton and Sandra Morgen (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming 2008).
Award Committee: Katherine Tate, University of California, Irvine (Chair); Ben Marquez, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Janelle Wong, University of Southern California
Citation: Julie Novkov's paper examines the legal and political roots of legal “color blindness” in American politics. It starts with Justice Harlan’s famous dissent in Plessy (1896) and moves to the civil rights era where legal and civil rights activists worked to find a political formula that would protect minorities against acts of racism and rectify the accumulated disadvantages of discrimination. A nuanced and historically grounded analysis, Novkov illuminates the Constitutional strategies pursued by Civil Rights lawyers and the way their words and strategies were used over time by conservatives. Novkov sheds new light on the movement of the concept of colorblindness from American minorities to entrenched conservative majorities.
The committee reviewed a number of important papers nominated for the 2008 Lucius J. Barker Award. As a former President of the American Political Science Association and as the current William Bennett Munro Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, Professor Lucius J. Barker has long served as an emblem of excellent scholarship on race, ethnicity and politics. It selected Julie Novkov’s paper for this award because it exemplifies the spirit of Lucius J. Barker’s work, especially in terms of his teaching and research in Judicial Politics, Constitutional Law, and racial equality.
Patrick J. Fett Award, Best Paper on the Scientific Study of Congress and the Presidency, 2007
Michael H. Crespin, University of Georgia
David W. Rohde, Duke University
Dimensions, Issues, and Bills: Appropriations Voting on the House Floor
Michael Crespin (left) is a former APSA Congressional Fellow and is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Georgia.
David W. Rohde (right) is Ernestine Friedl Professor of Political Science and Director of the Political Institutions and Public Choice Program at Duke University.
Award Committee: Barbara Sinclair, University of California, Los Angeles (Chair); Frank Baumgartner, Pennsylvania State University; David E. Lewis, Princeton University
Citation: The authors posit that although congressional "roll calls may lead us to believe that voting is unidimensional, we should not necessarily conclude that preferences were unidimensional." To test their hypothesis they use the Poole-Rosenthal NOMINATE procedure to explore the dimensional structure of and consistency of member positions on appropriations roll calls across issue areas (defined by Appropriations subcommittee.) They convincingly demonstrate that "some issue areas are multidimensional and members do not always vote in a consistent fashion on all issues."
Crespin and Rohde emphasize that their results do not contradict the original Poole-Rosenthal findings nor the utility of the NOMINATE scores for many analyses. They do argue that when the focus is on voting on specific bills, a more fine grained measure may be called for. Their findings also have important implications for understanding the importance of agenda control and the role of party leadership in Congress. Further they remind us that we should beware of reifying even the most useful of constructed measures. The paper has the best of broadly important substantive findings as well as a sophisticated use of appropriate statistical research methods.Pi Sigma Alpha Award, Best Paper, 2007
Christina L. Boyd, Washington University in St. Louis
Lee Epstein, Northwestern University
Andrew D. Martin, Washington University in St. Louis
Untangling the Causal Effects of Sex on Judging
Christina L. Boyd (right) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. She is currently writing her dissertation on placing federal district courts in the judicial hierarchy.
Lee Epstein (left) is the Beatrice Kuhn Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Andrew D. Martin (right) is professor of political science and law and chair of the Political Science Department at Washington University in St. Louis. He serves as the founding Director of the Center for Empirical Research in the Law and is a Resident Fellow of the Center in Political Economy. He is an associate editor of Political Analysis.
Award Committee: Jane Junn, Rutgers University (Chair); Larry Dodd, University of Florida; Will Moore, Florida State University
Review of Politics Award, 2007
Jeff Motter, Indiana University
Melanie Loehwing, Indiana University
Difference in the Rhetorical Public Sphere
Award Committee: Jeff Spinner-Halev, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Chair); Steven A. Gerencser, Indiana University, South Bend; Denise Schaeffer, Holy Cross
Robert H. Durr Award, Best Paper Applying Quantitative Methods to a Substantive Problem, 2007
Matthew Gentzkow, University of Chicago
Jesse M. Shapiro, University of Chicago
What Drives Media Slant? Evidence from U.S. Daily Newspapers
Matthew Gentzkow is assistant professor of economics, the John Huizinga Faculty Fellow at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received his PhD in economics from Harvard University.
Jesse M. Shapiro is assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and a Faculty Research Fellow in Labor Studies at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He attended Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor's degree summa cum laude in economics, a master's degree in statistics, and a PhD in economics.
Award Committee:Chris Mooney, University of Illinois, Springfield (Chair); Shigeo Hirano, Columbia University; Layna Mosley, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Citation: In this paper, Gentzkow and Shapiro tackle broad and unresolved questions of cause and effect regarding media bias in the United States. Gentzkow and Shapiro make a rich contribution to the literature in this area: they conceive of media bias as a commodity whose demand is related to the policy preferences of news consumers. They demonstrate that, far from being some nefarious conspiracy by the owners of media outlets (in their study, newspapers), media bias is a supply-side response to consumer demands. Media owners make a business decision to provide news consumers with what they want to read—news that is biased in favor of their policy predispositions.
Gentzkow and Shapiro’s contribution, though, is not limited to this theoretically innovative and politically important treatment of media slant. Their empirical and methodological contribution is equally, if not more, impressive. Gentzkow and Shapiro have earned the 2007 Durr Award because of the great lengths to which they went to gather data, verify its validity, and analyze it in ways that allowed them to make defensible claims about cause and effect. The authors devised an ingenious new measure of an important variable (newspaper "slant") that is notoriously hard to measure, gathering data from a wide range of sources, both primary and secondary. Their attention to detail in supporting and evaluating the validity and reliability of their measures should serve as a model of thoroughness for the discipline. But their attention to methodological detail goes beyond measurement; they developed instruments to control for endogeneity in their analyses, allowing them to draw stronger causal conclusions. Overall, the committee felt that among the nominated papers, Gentzkow and Shapiro’s was the most outstanding application of quantitative, empirical data and methods to address a very important substantive question.
Sophonisba Breckinridge Award, Best Paper on the Topic of Women and Politics, 2007
Mona Lena Krook, Washington University in St. Louis
Diana O'Brien, Washington University in St. Louis
Paper: "The Politics of Group Representation: Quotas for Women and Minorities Worldwide "
Mona Lena Krook is assistant professor of political science and women and gender studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her recent publications appear in Political Studies, the European Journal of Political Research, and Politics & Gender. She is the author of Quotas for Women in Politics: Gender and Candidate Selection Worldwide (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and co-editor with Sarah Childs of Women, Gender, and Politics: A Reader (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Diana O'Brien is a second-year Ph.D. student at Washington University in St. Louis. Before entering graduate school, she received her B.A in political science from Hanover College. Currently, her research focuses on the politics of gender equality, including state feminism and women and electoral politics.
Award Committee: Laurie Rhodebeck, University of Louisville (Chair); Rick Matland, Loyola University Chicago; Dara Strolovich, University of Minnesota
Westview Press Award, Best Paper by a Graduate Student, 2007
Neil Malhotra, Stanford University
Alexander Kuo, Stanford University
Assigning Blame: The Public’s Response to Hurricane Katrina
Neil Malhotra is the Melvin & Joan Lane Graduate Fellow and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. His research interests include political psychology, legislative politics, and survey methodology. His research has been published in The American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, among other outlets.
Alexander Kuo is a doctoral student in political science at Stanford University. His research interests are in comparative political economy and comparative political behavior.
Award Committee: Kenneth Scheve, Yale University (Chair); Eric Juenke-Gonzalez, University of Colorado, Boulder; Lori Weber, California State University, Chico
Citation: This imaginative paper examines how citizens assign blame when governments fail to do their job. As the authors argue, attributing responsibility for policy outcomes is a necessary first step for citizens to hold politicians accountable in the democratic process. As such, understanding why voters make the attributions that they do is central to understanding accountability in democratic politics. Malhotra and Kuo focus their attention on exploring how information about the official roles and the partisanship of public officials and their interactions influence who voters blame for poor performance.
The paper engages these questions in the context of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina. The authors conduct a survey experiment that required respondents to rank blame across seven public officials for the extent of loss of life and property damage from Hurricane Katrina. The experiment varied whether the respondent was provided information about the official's political party and the name of their office. The results indicate strong evidence of party cue effects with Democrats more likely to blame Republicans and vice versa. Importantly, however, they also find strong office effects which are not dominated by party cues. In their experiment, office cues either diluted or dominated the effect of party cues when both were present. These results along with others in the paper strike an optimistic note about the capacity of citizens to make the sort of reasonable blame attributions that are necessary to hold public officials accountable. While partisan biases are clearly evident, just a little bit of contextual information can substantially mitigate these biases.
The study provides both an insightful analysis of blame attribution for one of the most important events of recent years in American politics and an exciting step forward in the study of the capacity of citizens to hold their leaders accountable.