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The Wildenmann Prize
In acknowledging Rudolf Wildenmann's lasting contribution
to the ECPR, the Executive Committee decided in 1997
to donate this prize which is annually awarded to
a young colleague (within five years of receiving
their Ph.D.) for an outstanding paper presented at
the Joint Sessions of workshops.
The jury is made up of two Executive Committee members and the editors
of EJPR.
Rudolf Wildenmann
* 15.1.1921 † 14.7.1993
Rudolf Wildenmann will be remembered by his friends and colleagues for many things, not least of those being his role nationally and internationally in advancing electoral research.
He had, after his return in 1946 from Canada where he had been a POW, studied economics, sociology and political science at the University of Heidelberg where he both obtained his diploma and his PhD. After some years in journalism, he in 1959 joined Ferdinand A. Hermens at the University of Cologne who had just returned from the United States to accept a professorship there. Wildenmann collaborated in Cologne with Erwin K. Scheuch and the late Gerhard Baumert of the Frankfurt based DIVO institute to design the first major German election study after the war. The Special Issue No. 9 of the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie (entitled Zur Soziologie der Wahl) which he edited with Scheuch and Baumert amply
speaks to the complexity, advanced theoretical standing and innovativeness of that study; it has up to now not been surpassed on these dimensions by later work.
Wildenmann's love affair with the study of elections continued in Mannheim where in 1964 he had accepted a call to take the newly designed Lehrstuhl für Politische Wissenschaft. In the following years he became a nationally known figure in West Germany since he had teamed up with the Second German Television Network (ZDF) to analyse on TV all national and state elections between 1964 and 1972. It is typical for him that he used this TV connection to create a series of election studies which are a central building block even today in the set of German election studies distributed by the Cologne Zentralarchiv für Empirische Sozialforschung for secondary analysis. How close his attachment to electoral research has remained is signified by the last book he wrote: Wahlforschung (B.I. Taschenbuchverlag Mannheim, 1992).
To many European political scientists Wildenmann is probably even better known in the role he took in creating and developing the European Consortium of Political Research. He also was the "inventor" of ECPR's annual workshop sessions, probably the most distinctive and productive element in the many contemporary ECPR activities.
Rudolf Wildenmann was a scholar and institution builder. Those who were close to him will probably remember him most as a person of great warmth, never ceasing energy and hunger for life and new ideas.
Max Kaase, International University Bremen
Past winners of the Wildenmann Prize
2007 (presented in 2008)
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Rune Stubager
University of Aarhus
Department of Political Science |
Rune Stubager holds a PhD and an MSc in Political Science (both from the University of Aarhus) and an MA (with distinction) in Political Behaviour (University of Essex). He is currently employed as assistant professor in Political Science in the Department of Political Science, University of Aarhus where he teaches courses in statistics, electoral behaviour, and public opinion. His research interests include electoral behaviour, public opinion, agenda setting, value formation, and political sociology.
The award wining paper entitled “The Development of the Education Cleavage at the Electoral Level in Denmark: A Dynamic Analysis” was presented in the workshop on Politicising Socio-Cultural Structures: Elite and Mass Perspectives on Cleavages directed by Kevin Deegan-Krause and Zsolt Enyedi. The paper comes out of Stubager’s doctoral dissertation The Education Cleavage: New Politics in Denmark and tracks the development of the education cleavage in Danish politics over the past 20 years.
Stubager is currently engaged in work on a number of projects: On agenda setting between voters, politicians, and the media; on the determinants of opinion formation; and on Danish electoral behaviour. His work has (/will) appeared in such journals as Political Studies and the British Journal of Sociology.
2006 (presented in 2007)
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Kasper M. Hansen
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Department of Political Science
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His paper for the 2006 joint sessions, entitled
The Equality Paradox of Deliberative Democracy: Evidence
from a National Deliberative Poll, was presented
in the workshop on The Role of Political Discussion
in Modern Democracies in a Comparative Perspective
which was directed by Laura Morales and Gábor Tóka.
Kasper M. Hansen is associate professor of political
science. His research focuses on applied research
in democracy, deliberative democracy, elections,
referendums, public opinion and alternative methods
for public consultation. He teaches public opinion,
statistics, research methods, and comparative politics.
In 1998 he was a visiting fellow at the University
of Bergen, in 2001 at Stanford University, and in
2007 The Australian National University.
He has published a number of articles in European
Journal of Political Research, International Journal
of Public Opinion Research, Scandinavian Political
Studies, Public Administration, and Politica, Økonomi & Politik,
and Metode & Data. Hansen holds an M.Sc. (Cand.oecon.)
and a Ph.D.-degree from the University of Southern
Denmark in political science. Hansen has conducted
a number of Deliberative Polls – two of the
Deliberative Polls were conducted on the national
level in Denmark. His current project involves a
public opinion project set out to understand the
effects of political information and arguments on
a national representative sample. This study is conducted
as a large national survey experiment with competing
frames. This project is funded by the Danish Social
Science Research Council. Hansen is also part of
the research team conducting the Danish Election
Surveys.
2005 (presented in 2006)
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Martin
Hering
McMaster University, Canada
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Martin Hering is an assistant professor of political
science at McMaster University. His research interests
include welfare state reform, institutional change,
European integration, and party politics. He studied
at the Johns Hopkins University (Ph.D.), Philipps
University Marburg (M.A., B.A.), and the University
of Saskatchewan. He was a visiting researcher at the
MZES in Mannheim, the place where Rudolf Wildenmann
taught for many years.
His paper for the 2005 Joint Sessions, entitled
Retrenchment without Retribution: The Importance of
Party Collusion in Blame Avoidance, was presented
in the workshop on Blame Avoidance and Blame Management
which was directed by Christopher Hood and Moshe
Maor.
"Turning Ideas into Policies: Implementing Modern
Social Democratic Thinking in Germany’s Pension
Policy.” In Social Democratic Party Policies
in Contemporary Europe, edited by Giuliano Bonoli
and Martin Powell, 102-122. London: Routledge, 2004.
2004 (presented in 2005)
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Lesley
Hustinx
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven,
Belgium
Tilburg University, The Netherlands
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Lesley Hustinx earned her PhD in Social Sciences
in 2003 from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. During
her doctoral studies, she was a visiting scholar at
the Centre for Civil Society of the London School
of Economics and at the Centre for Management and
Organization Studies of the Stockholm School of Economics.
She currently is a postdoctoral fellow of the Flemish
Fund for Scientific Research at the Centre for Sociology
of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Since January
1, 2006, she also works as an assistant professor
of sociology at the department of Social Cultural
Sciences of Tilburg University. She is a member of
the ECPR Standing Group on Forms of Participation,
and of the European PhD Network on Civil Society.
Her major research interests include sociological
time diagnoses, theories of modernization and societies
in transition, civil society and trends in civic participation.
She has published in Voluntas: International Journal
of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, Nonprofit
and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Voluntary Action,
British Journal of Sociology of Education and
Social Service Review.
Her paper for the 2004 Joint Sessions, entitled
Beyond the tyranny of
the new? An explanatory model of styles of Flemish
Red Cross volunteering, was presented in the
workshop on Emerging Repertoires of Political Action:
Toward a Systematic Study of Post-conventional Forms
of Participation, which was directed by Marc Hooghe
and Dietlind Stolle. This paper summarizes the key
findings of her doctoral dissertation and critically
evaluates the current debate on the decline of traditional
forms of participation, and the simultaneous rise
of new modes of involvement. With data drawn from
a representative survey of Flemish Red Cross volunteers,
it is shown that forms of participation and their
main correlates are far more complex and inconsistent
than a simple binary distinction between ?traditional'
and ?new' would suggest. The research findings underscore
the urgent need for more specificity in conceptualization
and classification beyond popular thinking in terms
of an epochal break between tradition and modernity
and an eager emphasis on the 'new'.
2003 (presented in 2004)
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Zsolt
Enyedi
Central European University, Hungary |
Zsolt Enyedi studied at Eotvos Lorand University,
Central European University (Budapest) and at the
University of Amsterdam, receiving four M. A.'s in
various branches of social sciences (sociology, political
science, comparative social sciences and history).
He earned his PhD in Political Science in 1998 from
the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Currently he is
Assistant Professor at the Central European University.
Zsolt Enyedi's major interests include party politics,
Christian Democracy, church and state relations, authoritarianism,
prejudices and political tolerance. On these subjects
he co-edited three volumes and authored or co-authored
two books and a large number of articles and chapters.
Zsolt Enyedi can be reached at Enyedizs@ceu.hu
and his personal
website can be found at: http://www.ceu.hu/polsci/enyedi.html
2002 (presented in 2003)
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José
Fernández-Albertos
Instituto Juan March and Harvard University |
José Fernández-Albertos earned a BA
in Political Science and Administration from the Universidad
Complutense (Madrid), a MA in Social Sciences from
the Juan March Institute (Madrid), center with which
he is still affiliated, and is currently a Ph.D candidate
in the Department of Government at Harvard University.
His dissertation project –part of which is the
paper awarded with the Wildenmann prize- deals with
the ways in which characteristics of the domestic
political economy affect the economic openness of
nations. Apart from his general interest in political
economy and, more particularly, on the interplay between
domestic variables and economic internationalization,
he has also worked on the determinants of public opinion
towards the European Union, the politics of central
bank independence, and on empirical applications of
spatial models to electoral behavior in Spain, having
published some of this work on several journals and
books.
The paper “Trade Liberalization in Latin America:
Why Is There No Compensation?” addresses the
puzzle that the recent Latin American experience poses
to established wisdom by many political economy literature:
contrary to the well-known compensation argument,
the extraordinary foreign economic liberalization
pursed in the last two decades in the region does
not seem to have been accompanied by a systematic
increase in the size of the government. By developing
a more theoretically meaningful rationale for the
relationship between openness and compensation, the
paper provides an empirically sound answer to the
puzzle. The argument can be summarized as follows:
The impact that economic openness will have on demands
for redistribution depends critically on two factors
-the availability of currency policy and the inequality
that internationalization is expected to generate
domestically. Since these two variables are likely
to differ cross-nationally, there is no reason to
expect a homogeneous response of governments to increased
economic openness. Evidence from fourteen Latin American
countries during the 1974-1995 period supports the
two main contentions of the paper: first, whereas
governments under floating exchange regimes can resort
to currency devaluation as a compensatory device,
and thereby can avoid increases in public expenditures
while opening the economy, countries with fixed exchange
regimes do increase spending as a response to trade
liberalization. And second, and more importantly,
public-sector compensation is conditional on the distributive
effects that trade liberalization is expected to yield
domestically: the lower the income-inequality generated
by internationalization (because the low-income groups
own those factors with which the country is relatively
abundant, or because there are no significant sectors
negatively affected by openness), the less compensation
will be provided by governments as a response to openness.
Finally, the paper emphasizes the inherent interplay
between domestic economic characteristics, currency
policy, fiscal policy and commercial policy. In an
attempt to endogenize the process of economic liberalization
in the region, it is shown that as long as trade reforms
need to be politically sustainable, differences in
combinations of the other three elements explain a
great deal of the variation in the rhythm with which
trade openness have been embraced in Latin America.
José Fernández-Albertos can be reached
both at jfernandez@ceacs.march.es
and at albertos@fas.harvard.edu.
2001 (presented in 2002)
Hannah Bäck for her paper "Coalition
Formation and the Inclusion of Green Parties in
Swedish Local Government"
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