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The SCR awards the 2002 Mattei Dogan Award
(for best book published in the field of comparative research) to:
G. Bingham Powell, Jr., Elections as Instruments of
Democracy: Majoritarian and Proportional Visions (Yale
University Press, 2000), and
Susan C. Stokes, Mandates and Democracy: Neoliberalism
by Surprise in Latin America (Cambridge University Press,
2001).
The SCR awards the 2002 Seymour Martin Lipset Award (for
best comparative Ph.D. dissertation) to:
Kimberly Morgan, Whose Hand Rocks The
Cradle? (Princeton University).
Details below
2002 Dogan Award Winners:
G. Bingham Powell, Jr.
The first co-winner, Bing Powell’s Elections as Instruments of
Democracy, is a careful analysis of the way alternative electoral
rules affect the nature of democracy. Concentrating on
well-established democratic states (essentially the OECD
countries), Powell contrasts majoritarian and proportional views
of the democratic project. The former stresses decisiveness at the
expense of incorporating minority views. The latter stresses broad
representation at the possible expense of decisiveness. The author
does a fine job of amassing data on the contrast and of showing
how actual systems diverge from their contrasting ideals. The book
contributes to our understanding of how alternative democratic
systems translate votes into policy positions and demonstrates the
tradeoffs that exist in practice. It focuses on party, government,
and voter ideology, not the actually policies that are enacted,
but it established a solid foundation on which such work could be
built. Powell presents the results in a clear and straightforward
way that recognizes the limitations of the data at the same time
as it suggests generalizations and extensions.
Susan C. Stokes
The second co-winner of the Dogan Award chosen by the committee is
Susan C. Stokes, Mandates and Democracy. The book is an
outstanding combination of empirical analysis and democratic
theory, grouped around the highly significant question of why
politicians sometimes very clearly violate their electoral
mandates, particularly the switching by Latin American
office-holders to unpopular neoliberal policies. She analyzes the
cases of switches (especially Fujimori in Peru and Menem in
Argentina) in the context of the many elections where no switches
took place. Using both case studies and statistical analysis, she
studies reasons why switches took place, demonstrating that they
seem motivated more by political expediency and ideology than by
corruption and rent-seeking. In her studies of public opinion in
Peru, Argentina, and Venezuela, she shows that voters may support
policies ex post that they opposed ex ante. However, even if
voters support changes in policies, the regime in power may not be
capable of carrying them out successfully. Both co-winning books
are insightful and important contributions to the theory of
democratic representation.
The review committee for the Mattei Dogan Award were Arend
Lipjhart, Susan Rose-Ackerman, and Christian Joppke.
2002 Lipset Award Winner:
Kimberly Morgan
Morgan, a unanimous choice of the prize committee, studies the
evolution of governmental policy toward day care. For children in
a representative sample (chosen chiefly to assure maximum
variation on the dependent variable) of European states. Her
treatment is thorough, painstakingly well grounded in the
historical literature, respectful to (while usually disagreeing
with) earlier analyses, and -- most importantly -- offers
extraordinarily perceptive new insights. To cite only one
particularly impressive example, Morgan observes that France
adopted an extensive system of day care even in the late
nineteenth century -- far too “early” in terms of the country's
level of wealth or rate of female labor force participation --
and, atypically, linked day care to the existing system of public
schools. Morgan shows historically, and corroborates from the
experience of other states with similar ideological cleavages,
that day care in France was quite consciously linked to the
secular-clerical struggle: day care was seen as a Republican
device to break the prevailing monopoly of Church and family in
early childhood socialization.
More broadly, Morgan argues persuasively against current theories
that take child-care to be a fundamentally gender or age-related
social issue. On the contrary, she shows that child care policies
across the states she examines intersect with broader social and
cultural distinctions; they reflect the ways in which conflicts
between competing religious, ethnic, gender and race-linked
"visions" of the future have played out in various political
arenas.
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