Vera E. Troeger Best Article Prize
The PSRM Best Article Prize has been renamed the Vera E. Troeger Best Article Prize in honour of the journals' first Editor. The prize will continue to be awarded annually to the 'best' article published in the previous year's volume of PSRM.
Where not open access, previous award-winning articles can be found free of charge until further notice below.
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Award Committee: Dominik Hangartner, Vicky Fouka and Janne Tukianen
"The paper by Henning Finseraas and Ole Henning Nyhus, “The Political Consequences of Technological Change that Benefits Low-Skilled Workers,” makes a novel contribution to the political economy literature on technological change and electoral behavior. While existing work has focused on how negative shocks to low-skilled workers fuel support for populist parties, invoking psychological explanations, this paper draws attention to an overlooked political economy channel rooted in material self-interest. The authors argue that positive economic shocks can also boost support for the right by reducing demand for redistribution and public insurance. Using the case of Norway’s salmon aquaculture boom, they present evidence consistent with the argument that rising demand for low-skilled labor leads to greater support for the right, driven by economic rather than cultural considerations. These findings underscore the complexity of political responses to economic change and open new questions about the conditions under which economic shocks increase or reduce support for populism. Future research can build on this contribution by testing its implications across other contexts and with alternative empirical strategies."
The PSRM award committee made up of Mike Lewis-Beck, Sona Golder and Fabio Franchino is delighted to announce that the winner of 2023's "Best Paper"
award is Alexei Sisulu Abrahams (Harvard University) for the
article "Hard traveling: unemployment and road infrastructure in the shadow of political conflict."
The committee had the following to say about the winning article:
"The Abrahams article asks a question with great political and policy relevance: Can high unemployment in a region of serious political conflict, specifically the West Bank, be reduced via infrastructure intervention on the part of standing governments, as leading international funding agencies, e.g., the World Bank, suggest? He juxtaposes the rival theoretical literatures in political science and economics, then goes on to test the unemployment effects of strategic placement of roadblocks on the part of the Israeli state. The results show roadblocks do have a "protection" impact, so increasing employment; however, they also have an "obstruction" impact, which decreases employment. This contradictory flow, where some communities show increases and some decreases, is well mapped geo-spatially. He addresses several data collection and identification challenges in very innovative ways, including the employment of nighttime luminosity of Palestinian towns from satellite imagery to estimate pre-obstacle Palestinian commuter flows, and the use of the lengthwise proximity of Israeli settlements to Palestinian commuter routes as an instrument to quasi-randomize the blockadedness of Palestinian neighbourhoods (See especially the elegant instrumental variable analysis in Table 4). To quote his straightforward conclusion: "I show that unemployment rises in some neighborhoods while falling in others as firms substitute between different pools of labor." On net, then, contrary to the dominant finding in the literature, infrastructure reform is a wash, as the positive and negative effects virtually cancel each other out. This calls into question the prevailing, costly, modus operandi of international development organizations."
In 2022 Political Science Research and Methods (PSRM) Editor Paul Kellstedt empaneled an award committee comprising of Ruth Dassonneville (Chair), Laron Williams, and Sven-Oliver Proksch to decide which article among the dozens of fabulous articles in PSRM in 2021 was the very best one.
The committee is delighted to announce that the winners of 2022's "Best Paper"
award are Leonardo Baccini (McGill University) and Lucas Leeman (University of Zurich) for their
article 'Do natural disasters help the environment? How voters respond and what that means.'
The committee had the following to say about the winning article:
"In their paper, Baccini and Leemann use geospatial data on natural disasters in Switzerland that they match with referendum votes on issues related to climate change. By connecting these two data sources they find that experiencing natural disasters substantially increase support for pro-climate policies. This prize committee was impressed by the paper and identified many strong points in the paper.
"First, the authors make use of unique and rich microlevel data on natural disasters that allows geolocating exposure to floods; Second, the paper makes clever use of the Swiss context--that relies strongly on direct democracy to examine the behavioural consequences of experiencing natural disasters; Third, the paper is empirically well conducted. The authors use different methods to estimate their effect and conduct a large number of additional tests - that all shed light on the robustness of the effects, and Finally, it deals with a societally important question. While pro-climate organizations worldwide are thinking about ways to increase support for pro-climate policies, this article informs on the extent to which natural disasters can contribute to bringing about change."