SPSA 2023 Awards
SPSA 2023 Award Presentations
Marian Irish Award
Committee Members:
Steven Greene
Laura Van Assendelft
Alixandra Yanus
The 2023 Marian Irish Award is being presented by Laura Van Assenfeldt to the authors of the Best Papers on Women and Politics presented at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association:
Representation and the Trade Roots of the Gender Pay Gap
Timm Betz – Technical University of Munich
David Fortunato – University of California, San Diego
Diana O’Brien – Rice University
THE CITATION READS:
“Representation and the Trade Roots of the Gender Pay Gap” by Timm Betz, David Fortunato, and Diana O’Brien examines the international gender wage gap through the lens of trade agreements. Their findings link trade protections to the representation of women in government. Specifically, they demonstrate that, particularly in nations where women hold a smaller share of legislative seats, trade protections are more likely to favor male-dominated industries. This, combined with the historic underrepresentation of women in many governments around the world, has contributed to the global gender wage gap. Betz, Fortunato, and O’Brien’s study has important implications for scholars of representation, gender, and trade liberalization.”
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Neal Tate Award
Committee Members:
Michael Fix
Gbemende Johnson
Joseph Smith
The 2023 Neal Tate Award is being presented by Joseph Smith to the authors of the Best Paper on Judicial Politics presented at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association:
The Costs of Court Curbing: Preliminary Evidence from the Latin American Opinion Project
Amanda Driscoll, Florida State University
Michael J. Nelson, Pennsylvania State University
Amanda Driscoll is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Florida State University and an Associate Professor of Law (by Courtesy) at Florida State College of Law. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Washington University in St. Louis. Her research and teaching interests center on comparative democratic institutions of modern Latin America, with particular regard for courts, the separation of powers, and the rule of law. Her research has been published or is forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Journal of Law and Courts, World Development, Political Research Quarterly, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Electoral Studies, and the European Political Science Review, among others, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation.
Michael J. Nelson is a Professor of Political Science and Social Data Analytics at The Pennsylvania State University and Affiliate Faculty at Penn State Law. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Washington University in St. Louis. Professor Nelson researches and teaches about courts in the United States and abroad with special attention to public support for courts and judicial elections. In addition to articles in a variety of political science and legal journals, he is the co-author of Black and Blue: How African Americans Judge the U.S. Legal System, The Politics of Federal Prosecution, Judging Inequality, and The Elevator Effect: Contact and Collegiality in the American Judiciary. Professor Nelson’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation.
THE CITATION READS:
I had the privilege of chairing the committee to select the recipient of the Neal Tate Award, which recognizes the best paper on Judicial Politics presented at last year’s conference. Working with me were Mike Fix and Gbemende Johnson. All the nominated papers asked important questions and were well-designed and well-written. Ultimately, we agreed that Amanda Driscoll and Mike Nelson’s paper, “The Costs of Court-Curbing: Preliminary Evidence from the Latin American Public Opinion Project,” deserved the award.
Driscoll and Nelson address a fundamentally important question in today’s world: do our assumptions about mass support for independent judiciaries hold in the face of recent attacks on these institutions by populist leaders. That is, do presidents lose political support when they undermine well-respected and popular judicial systems. To address this question, they combine a clear theoretical framework with a creative survey experiment across eight Latin American countries. They find that while the public disapproves of such attacks, they do not punish incumbents for this behavior. The authors provide overwhelming evidence in support of their conclusions presented in a clear and easily digestible way.
It’s an example of research that generates new knowledge on an important real-world question that is relevant to judicial systems across the world. I encourage you to read the paper.
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Pi Sigma Alpha/Malcolm Jewell Award
Committee Members:
Jae-Hee Jung, Chair
Richard Fording
Jordan Carr Peterson
The 2023 Malcolm Jewell Award is being presented by Jordan Carr Peterson to the author of the Best Graduate Student Paper presented at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association
Bureaucratic Capacity in the Administrative Presidency
Nicholas R. Bednar, Vanderbilt University
Bio: Nick Bednar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. He studies bureaucratic politics, administrative law, and immigration law and policy. His dissertation, Maintaining the American State, examines when Congress and the president are willing to invest in bureaucratic capacity. Prior to beginning his graduate studies, he received a B.A. in political science and history from the University of Minnesota and a J.D. from Minnesota Law School.
THE CITATION READS:
Bednar’s “Bureaucratic Capacity in the Administrative Presidency” makes a strong contribution to the study of American executive politics. It illustrates the importance of incorporating the role of bureaucratic capacity in presidential behavior and policymaking. The paper also argues that the effect of bureaucratic capacity on administrative policymaking is shaped by the president’s structural control of the agency and the agency’s ideological distance from the president. The research design is impressive as well. It uses a wide array of data and includes original large-scale data collection to measure bureaucratic capacity. Bednar’s paper stood out from the other papers in its clear theoretical significance, rigorous analyses, and polished writing. With this award, we wish to congratulate and acknowledge a very promising research agenda.
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Best Paper Award
Committee Members:
Jeff Lazarus, Chair
Kevin McGuire
Emily Nacol
2023 Best Paper Award is being presented by Robert Howard to the authors of the Best Overall Paper presented at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association:
Representation and the Trade Roots of the Gender Pay Gap
Timm Betz – Technical University of Munich
David Fortunato – University of California, San Diego
Diana Z. O’Brien – Rice University
THE CITATION READS:
The committee is pleased to recognize this outstanding piece of research as the winner of this year’s Pi Sigma Alpha Best Paper Award. It addresses a non-obvious but inherently interesting question: What are the social demographic consequences of trade policy? The paper starts from the premise that not all segments of a nation’s workforce are equally affected by its trade decisions. Amassing data across sixty nations, the authors then demonstrate that increases in the level of women working within a given economic sector are marked by significantly lower levels trade protection. This disparity ends up having noteworthy consequences; across nations, the gender-based gap in tariff protection translates into striking differences in the wage-earning power of men and women. By documenting how women do not reap the same benefits from trade policy as their male counterparts, this careful and meticulous study uncovers an important linkage between social and economic policy.
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Manning Dauer Award
Committee Members:
Teen Wilhelm, Chair
Virginia Gray
Bruce Larson
The 2023 Manning Dauer Award is being presented by Teena Wilhelm. This award is given biennially to a political scientist for exceptional service to the profession.
Recipient Informaton: David Lowery, who held the Bruce R. Miller and Dean D. LaVigne Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science at Pennsylvania State University
Here is a brief summary of David’s contributions to the profession, and motivation for our selection:
David Lowery served SPSA as the editor of the Journal of Politics from 1997 to 2001. He served on the JOP’s editorial board both before (1988-1991, 1993-1997) and after (2002-2006) his editorship. David further served the SPSA and the JOP by serving on the JOP Editor Selection Committee in 1998-99 and by chairing that selection committee in 2003-04. In addition, he served on the committee to select a publisher for the JOP in 1997-98. More broadly, David served the SPSA in other ways by being a member of its Committee on the Status of Dual Career Couples in 1990-93. He also served on the Pi Sigma Alpha Award committee to select the Best Paper at the Annual Meeting in 1993-94.
After some years outside of the US, David returned in 2010 assuming a position at Penn State University where he headed an institute and a policy initiative before retiring in 2019. He continued to be an active co-editor or associate editor of two other scholarly journals during this time.
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Joseph L Bernd Award
Committee Members:
Mark Peffley, Chair
Zeynep Somer-Topcu
Hannah Walker
The 2023 Joseph L. Bernd JOP Best Paper Award is being presented by Robert Howard to the authors of the Best Paper published in the Journal of Politics in 2022:
Title: Social Lobbying
Authors:
Christian R. Grose, University of Southern California
Pamela Lopez, K Street Consulting
Sara Sadhwani, Pomona College
Antoine Yoshinaka, University at Buffalo, State University of New York
“Social Lobbying” by Christian Grose, Pamela Lopez, Sara Sadhwani, and Antoine Yoshinaka, investigates the impact of direct social lobbying on the likelihood that lawmakers will support a given interest group’s preferred policy. Leveraging an extremely innovative, pre-registered field experiment that embodies all the best features of experiments designed to infer causation in a natural setting, together with supplementary survey data among registered lobbyists, the authors demonstrate the importance of out-of-office social encounters with lawmakers to influencing policy outcomes. The project takes on a topic that is fundamental to understanding American politics — how do interest groups (and the money they spend) influence preferences of policy makers? Despite concern among researchers and the public alike about the outsized influence of affluent organized interests, scholarship has concluded that direct lobbying does not significantly impact lawmakers’ decisions. In contrast, the authors here show 1) that direct social lobbying, outside the space of the office, does impact outcomes, and 2) that it occurs quite frequently. The paper is therefore an important entry into interest group politics — a central driver in American political life. The committee was especially impressed with the novel partnership developed with a lobbying firm in California, without which the field experiment (novel in its own right) would not have been possible. What set this paper apart, moreover, was the use of multiple methods to bolster their arguments. The authors fielded an original survey of registered lobbyists across the states, finding that social lobbying is a common practice nationally. The findings affirm a common understanding about how politics works — and as such, had they been null they would have been just as important an entry into the American politics canon. The committee views this article as one that encapsulates all the best of leading-edge social science—powerful theories tested with rigorous methods that demonstrate causation. It will be a model of how to advance social science knowledge in a variety of fields.
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V.O. Key Award
Committee Members:
Angie Maxwell, Chair
Michael Nelson
Kelly Patterson
The 2023 V.O. Key Award is being presented by Angie Maxwell to the authors of the Best Book on Southern Politics:
Congress and the First Civil Rights Era: 1861-1918
Jeffery A. Jenkins, University of Southern California
Justin Peck, Wesleyan University
Publisher: University of Chicago Press (2021)
THE CITATION READS:
As we learn more about the dynamics between institutional features and aspirations for justice, we often surmise that the history moves in linear fashion. It is easy to assume that because more people want a form of justice that changes to the institutions will result in more justice. Congress and the First Civil Rights Era: 1861-1918 by Jeffrey A. Jenkins and Justin Peck reminds us of the feedback loops that occur and often derail attempts to see more expansive notions of justice prevail. Using an extensive analysis of legislation and party dynamics over an almost 60-year period, the authors demonstrate the ways in which a new politics emerged to frustrate efforts to achieve equality before the law. The research traces the political forces that pushed the Republican party away from its earlier dreams of creating a strong party in the South based on the support of Blacks. This abandonment of the larger electoral goal had significant ramifications for the types of legislation that Republicans wanted to pursue, with dramatic consequences for party politics and for the Blacks abandoned by this change. The attention to the details of legislation and their situation in the politics of the era provide a stunning look at the ways in which electoral incentives, institutions, and commitments to justice all swirl together to affect political outcomes. This book should be read by scholars of institutions, historians, and American political development. The research is key in helping us to understand the ways in which politics open some possibilities and foreclose others.
