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The SCR awards the 2000 Mattei Dogan Award
(for best book published in the field of comparative research) to:
James Scott, Seeing Like a State (Yale
University Press, 1998)
The SCR awards the 2000 Seymour Martin Lipset Award (for
best comparativist Ph.D. dissertation) to:
Kathleen Collins, "Clan Politics in
Central Asia." (Stanford University)
Lanny W. Martin, "Coalition, Politics and
Parliamentary Government." (University of Rochester)
Details below
2000 Dogan Award Winner:
James Scott
Seeing like a State is a book of impressive historical and
comparative sweep, ranging in time across three centuries and in
space across several continents. It is a work of formidable
scholarship and brilliantly illuminating detail, but at the same
time a powerful and deeply felt critique of the hubris of state
planners, committed to order, simplicity, and progress, and
believing in their own superior knowledge. In place of their
schematic, abstract, simplifying and totalizing schemes for
improvement -- well-intentioned schemes that have often gone
terribly awry -- Scott offers a humane plea for the understanding
of and respect for the immense complexity of natural and social
systems and for correspondingly flexible, reversible, tentative,
and decentralized forms of intervention in such systems. Although
critical of the state, the book argues not for complacency or
quiescence but for forms of intervention that can mobilize, rather
than disregard or destroy, the practical knowledge of ordinary
citizens.
2000 Lipset Award Winners:
Kathleen Collins
The thesis has profound implications for one of the central
theoretical and practical questions of our times, the transition
to democracy. The dissertation is open to all dimensions of theory
-- structural and agentic, rational interest, institutional and
cultural -- and tests the existing alternative theories of this
transition. The work employs a wonderfully appropriate research
design to test these theories. The author analyzes three cases
that are constant on many conditioning factors but vary in three
ways on the dependent variable, outcomes of regime transition:
formal democracy, autocracy, and breakdown (unlike most studies
which sample on the dependent variable, using only successful
cases). The dissertation develops a new theoretical explanation of
the democratic transition and its failures -- that of clan pacts,
the social infrastructure that determines the functioning of
suddenly imposed or adopted formal democratic institutions. This
new explanation provides the basis for substantive policy
recommendations on how best to sponsor transitions to democracy –
outsiders should stress and foster distributed, productive (not
extractive) economic growth so that ordinary people will become
less economically dependent upon clans, causing clan elites and
pacts to become more responsive to democratic state-building. This
recommendation flies in the face of common US foreign policy
practice of demanding formal democratic institutions and market
shock therapy in these countries. Moreover, the author conducted
stunningly original field research, even braving political
conditions that, requiring body-guards, evidently at times put her
own freedom and life in jeopardy. On top of all that, the author
tells an absorbing story, with a graceful and literary style and
references to local culture and color, in a way that thoroughly
captivates the reader.
Lanny W. Martin
A huge amount has been written, going back to the fifties,
about coalition formation in multiparty parliamentary democracies,
but the work has been overwhelmingly theoretical and anecdotal.
The ideas advanced have not been tested in any serious way because
of measurement and statistical problems. Martin has used a newish
statistical technique to test a very large number of hypotheses
drawn from this literature. The measures of variables he chooses
are reasonable, his discussion of statistical results very
sensible. This dissertation makes an important contribution to its
field.
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