|
The 2005 Mattei Dogan Award
(for best book published in the field of comparative research) is
awarded to Catherine Boone for
Political Topographies of
the African State: Territorial Authority and Institutional Choice
(Cambridge). Atul Kohli received an honorable
mention for his book, State-Directed Development: Political
Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery
(Cambridge).
The SCR awards the 2005 Seymour Martin Lipset Award (for
best comparative Ph.D. dissertation) jointly to
Cornelia Woll (Institut d’études
politiques de Paris and Universität zu Köln) for her dissertation,
“The Politics of Trade Preferences: Business Lobbying on Service
Trade in the United States and the European Union,” and to
Heather Stoll (Stanford University) for
“Social Cleavages, Political Institutions and Party Systems:
Putting Preferences Back into the Fundamental Equation of
Politics.”
2005 Dogan Award:
Catherine Boone
Political Topographies of the African State
is an
impressively researched study of state-building, with broad
implications. Focusing on central government avenues of control
and extraction of local resources under both colonialism and
post-colonial regimes in three West African countries, Catherine
Boone shows how and why the different regions within a country are
ruled differently, depending on their extractive resources, the
local organization of society, and in particular the
socio-political degree of hierarchy and consequent power base of
local elites and their capacity to resist the center’s exactions.
In demonstrating how center-periphery relations vary even within
countries, she is able to explain why the central authorities
share power with local elites in some regions, why they usurp
power in other regions and localities, and why and where they
establish “administrative occupations” resembling military
occupations. Of particular interest, she shows in detail that,
regardless of professed ideology, the governments acted in
parallel ways when faced with similar local political economies—be
it Senghor’s Senegal, Nkhruma’s Ghana, or the Ivory Coast. These
multiple examples give her book persuasive force. Boone’s findings
challenge the dominant new institutionalist framework, both in its
historical and rational-choice variants. For her, the
institutional arrangements are the dependent variables to be
explained, and she uses political economy and class analysis
powerfully to achieve this task. While the book’s case studies lie
in Africa, her mode of analysis can help illuminate the politics
and recent histories of other regionally divided states around the
world. Political Topographies of the African State deserves
to have an impact in the broader field of comparative research.
Atul Kohli
State-Directed Development
is theoretically ambitious, well argued and likely to have an
impact on the field. Focusing on four case studies, Atul Kohli
argues forcefully that no late-late development is possible
without substantial state intervention. He distinguishes three
ideal-type states among late-late developing countries:
neo-patrimonial, cohesive-capitalist and fragmented-multiclass
states. Analyzing economic development over the second half of the
last century in Nigeria, India, Brazil and South Korea, he shows
why a neo-patrimonial state such as Nigeria produces disastrous
economic results; why rapid industrialization is most readily
attained in repressive cohesive-capitalist states (South Korea,
especially under Park Chung Hee, exemplifies this form); while
fragmented-multiclass states (e.g., India) have attained mixed
results. This book may possibly have an impact on the field
similar to Peter Evan’s Embedded Autonomy, James Scott’s
Seeing like a State (winner of the 2000 Dogan Award) or Robert
Wade’s Governing the Market.
Review
committee for the Mattei Dogan Award: Jonathan Unger
(chair), Eiko Ikegami, and Ivan Szelenyi.
2005 Lipset Award:
Cornelia Woll
This dissertation
examines business lobbying in the European and American air
transport and telecommunication industries. Through interviews
with key policymakers and business representatives, Woll traces
how business leaders and their representatives have sought to
influence EU and US trade policy. The two case studies illustrate
a model of “regulated competition” that resists the usual efforts
to locate trade policy on a single underlying dimension of market
integration. The dissertation also develops a theory of preference
formation in which national and transnational institutions shape
not just the interests and strategic behavior of actors, but also
actors own ideas about their identities. The committee found this
to be an original and fascinating work on a topic of clear
importance.
Heather Stoll
In many ways, Stoll’s dissertation provides a counterpoint to
Woll’s research. Heather Stoll’s dissertation provides a
methodologically sophisticated quantitative analysis of the links
between political cleavages and the party system. Reconceptualizing Lipset and Rokkan’s classic treatment of social
cleavages, Stoll distinguishes what she calls latent, politicized,
and particized cleavages. Latent cleavages divide sociological
categories and capture the kinds of social divisions described by
Lipset and Rokkan. When such social divisions mark lines of
political conflict, Stoll speaks of political cleavages, while
particized cleavages attach party labels to political conflicts.
Through a careful analysis of electoral data from dozens of
countries, Stoll traces the effects of these bases of political
preference on the structure of the national party systems. This is
a bold yet rigorous dissertation that greatly impressed the
committee
Review committee for the
Lipset Award:
Bruce Western (chair), David Apter, and G. Bingham Powell.
|
