2023 Award
Winner: Luis Flores (University of Michigan) for “Zoning as a Labor Market Regulation.”
Honorable Mention: Shilin Jia (University of Chicago) and Benjamin Rohr (University of Mannheim) for “Vacancy Chains as Strategy: Inter-Administration Mobility of Political Elites in Reform China.”
2022 Award
Winner: Jen Triplett (U. of Michigan) for “Articulating the Pueblo Cubano: Women’s Politicization and Productivity in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959.” (Published at the American Sociological Review)
Honorable Mention: Mary Shi (UC-Berkeley) for “’Until Indian title shall be… fairly extinguished:’ The Public Lands, Settler Colonialism, and Early Government Promotion of Infrastructure in the United States.”
2021 Award
Winner: Omri Tubi (Northwestern), “Kill me a mosquito and I will build a state: political economy and the socio-technicalities of Jewish colonization in Palestine, 1922–1940” Theory and Society: 50, pages 97–124 (2021).
Honorable Mention: Wen Xie (Chicago), “Generation as Structure: Market Transformation in China’s Socialist Industrial Heartland”
2020 Award
Winner: Simeon J. Newman, University of Michigan, “Mass Clientelism: A Mode of Political Intermediation.”
Honorable Mention: Lantian Li, Northwestern University, “Redefining Innovation for Development: The Political Economy of New Drug Classification in China.”
2019 Award
Winner: Luciana de Souza Leao “Optics of the State: The Politics of Making Poverty Visible in Brazil and Mexico” (Ph.D. candidate, Columbia University).
2018 Award
Winner: Yueran Zhang “Preempting “No Taxation without Representation”: The Case of Taxing Private Homeownership in China.”
Honorable Mention: A.K.M. Skarpelis for “Beyond Aryans: Making Germans in the Nazi Empire”
Honorable Mention: Katrina Quisumbing King for “The Sources and Political Uses of Ambiguity in Statecraft”
2017 Award
Winner: Chengpang Lee (Chicago, Sociology) and Myung-Sahm Suh (Chicago, Divinity School), “State-Building and Religion: Explaining the Diverged Path of Religious Change in Taiwan and South Korea, 1950-1980.”
Honorable Mention: Alexander F. Roehrkasse (Berkeley, Sociology), “The Demise of the Debtors’ Prison: Market Development, State Formation, and the Moral Politics of Credit.”
2016 Award
Winner: Mohammad Ali Kadivar. “Mass Mobilization and the Durability of New Democracies”, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Honorable Mention: Adaner Usmani. “Democracy and the Class Struggle”, New York University.
2015 Award
Winner: Robert Braun. “Religious Minorities and Resistance to Genocide: The Collective Rescue of Jews in the Netherlands during the Holocaust.” Political Science, Cornell University. (Forthcoming, American Political Science Review)
2014 Award
Co-Winner: Eric W. Schoon and A. Joseph West. “From Prophecy to Practice: Mutual Selection Cycles in the Routinization of Charismatic Authority.” University of Arizona.
Co-Winner: Emily A. Marshall. “Great Expectations? Population Projections and Politics in Twentieth Century France and Great Britain.” Princeton University and University of Michigan.
2013 Award
Winner: Yael Berda (Princeton), “The Peculiar Persistence of Colonial Legacies: Why New Nations Reproduce State Practices against which their Founders Struggled.”
Honorable Mention: Deirdre Bloome and Christopher Muller (Harvard), “Slavery and African-American Marriage in the Postbellum South, 1860-1880.”
2012 Award
Co-Winner: Carly Knight (Harvard). “A Voice but Not a Vote: The Case of Surrogate Representation and Social Welfare For Legal Noncitizens Since 1996.”
Co-Winner: Diana Rodriguez-Francoz (Northwestern). “Internal Wars, Taxation, and State Building.”
2011 Award
Winner: Joshua Bloom (UCLA). “Insurgent Influence on Truman’s Civil Rights Policy: A Theoretically Informed Event Structure Analysis.”
Honorable Mention: Josh Pacewicz (University of Chicago). “Old Factions, New Partnerships: How the Changing Integration of Economic and Civil Institutions Produces Avoidance of Partisan Politics in Local Life.”
2010 Award
Winner: Anoulak Kittikhoun (CUNY Graduate Center, Political Science), 2009. “Small State, Big Revolution: Geography and the Revolution in Laos.” Theory and Society 38(1).
Honorable Mention: Bart Bonikowski (Princeton), “Shared Representations of the Nation-State in Thirty Countries: An Inductive Approach to Cross-National Attitudinal Research.”
2009 Award
Winner: Ateş Altinordu (Yale), “The Politicization of Religion: Political Catholicism and Political Islam in Comparison.”
Honorable Mention: Wesley Hiers (UCLA), “The Colonial Roots of Racialized Polities.”
2008 Award
Winner: Besnik Pula (Michigan), “The Informal Road to State Power: State Building in the Albanian Highlands, 1919-1939.”
2007 Award
Winner: Anna Paretskaya (The New School), “Middle Class without Capitalism? Socialist Ideology and Post-Collectivist Discourse in Late Soviet Union”
2006 Award
Winner: Amy Kate Bailey (University of Washington), “Fertility and Revolution: When Does Political Change Influence Reproductive Behavior?”
2005 Award
Winner: Tammy Smith (Columbia University), “Narrative Networks and the Dynamics of Ethnic Conflict and Conciliation”
Honorable Mention: Martin Kreidl (University of California-Los Angeles), “Politics and Secondary School Tracking in Socialist Czechoslovakia, 1948-1989” European Sociological Review (2004) 20: 123-139.
2004 Award
Winner: Scott Leon Washington (Princeton University), “Principles of Racial Taxonomy.”
Honorable Mention: Jason W. Moore (Berkeley, Geography), “The Modern World System as Environmental History? Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism.” Theory and Society (June 2003) 32, pp. 307-377.
2003 Award
Winner: Ho-fung Hung. 2003. ?Orientalist Knowledge and Social Theories: China and the European Conceptions of East-West Differences from 1600 to 1900.? Sociological Theory. Vol. 21, No. 3. 254-79.
I am curious how this essay by Simeon J. Newman was received. For example, did the Social Psychology section feel…