ARHIV DRUŽBOSLOVNIH PODATKOV

23. 06. 2015

We are pleased to announce that Noam Lupu of the University of
Wisconsin-Madison is the winner of the 2015 GESIS Klingemann Prize for
the Best CSES Scholarship, for his paper "Party Polarization and Mass
Partisanship: A Comparative Perspective" that was published online in
June 2014 (and later in print) in the journal Political Behavior.



There will be a reception to honor Noam and his work on Friday August
28, 2015 at 7:30pm in Montreal, Canada at the annual meeting of the
European Consortium for Political Research. The reception will include
a brief presentation of the winning work, and an update about the
overall project.



This year's Selection Committee consisted of Rachel Meneguello of the
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Markus Quandt of the GESIS -
Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, and Zeynep Somer-Topcu of
Vanderbilt University. The Selection Committee described their
selection of the winning work as follows:



"An ongoing stream of analysis using Comparative Study of Electoral
System (CSES) data investigates the link between political parties and
voters, often with a view towards assessing the potential costs and
benefits regarding the overall quality of democratic representation.
The combination of soundly researched results and relevant, normative
questions about democratic systems is a hallmark of many of the best
of CSES-based publications.



This year's award winning work is another exemplar of this special
combination. Noam Lupu's article 'Party Polarization and Mass
Partisanship: A Comparative Perspective' provides a fresh look at the
effects of party polarization, i.e. the programmatic or ideological
distance among political parties of a certain political system at any
given point in time. While the conventional wisdom holds polarization
to be detrimental to the quality of governance, and to eventually
disengage citizens from their polity, Lupu shows that polarization can
also have markedly positive effects. Polarized party positions
increase the clarity of choice for the voters. Party polarization also
is related to an increased sense of relevance as to what happens in
the political arena. If subjective stakes are higher, so should be the
willingness to invest effort, time, skills, and emotion into politics,
and thus into the subjective attachment to parties.



Lupu confirms these core hypotheses using research with unprecedented
breadth, extremely careful development of necessary micro-level and
macro-level theoretical reasoning, and using state of the art
statistical methodology.



Lupu's work investigates these effects not only using CSES data in a
cross-national perspective, but also with longitudinal data from the
American National Election Studies and individual-level panel data
from the U.S. Political Socialization Study. In the paper, the
construct of party polarization is not only measured by aggregating
individual-level data, but also by coding party programs into
ideological distance measures. The robustness of the results to all of
this methodological variation is impressive.



In sum, the awarded work adds significantly and in innovative ways to
the body of knowledge about the reasons behind differences in mass
partisanship. It is in all respects a commendable and impressive use
of the CSES."



The CSES would like to thank this year's Selection Committee, and
express its appreciation for all of the nominations for this year's
prize. We would also like to thank the GESIS - Leibniz Institute for
the Social Sciences for sponsoring the prize.



Noam Lupu (2014). Party Polarization and Mass Partisanship: A
Comparative Perspective. Political Behavior, Volume 37, Issue 2, pp.
331-356. doi: 10.1007/s11109-014-9279-z

-----

The GESIS Klingemann Prize for the Best CSES Scholarship is awarded
for best CSES scholarship (paper, book, dissertation, or other
scholarly work, broadly defined) published or finalized in the
calendar year prior to the award. The prize is named in honor of
Professor Doctor Hans-Dieter Klingemann, an internationally renowned
political scientist, major contributor to comparative research, and
co-founder of the CSES project.

Oznake: 2015 CSES nagrada