Duncan Black Award

Details and past winners of the Duncan Black Award of the ECPR Standing Group on Analytical Politics and Public Choice

The Duncan Black Award Winner 2009

The 2009 Duncan Black Award goes to Elena Nikolova for the paper "Labour markets and representative institutions: Evidence from Colonial British America".   In her paper Elena Nikolova deals with the important question how democratic institutions are influenced by economic factors. While previous work has emphasized the importance of economic inequality, Elena Nikolova proposes a game-theoretical model suggesting that labor markets play an equally important (if not more important) role. The implications from this elegant and very persuasive model are subjected to thorough empirical tests on the basis of data from British colonies in America. Elena Nikolova finds considerable evidence for the important role labor markets have played in reducing suffrage restrictions. Thus, the paper not only provides theoretical innovations but also carefully designed empirical tests of the theoretically derived hypotheses.

The Duncan Black Award Winner 2007

The Standing Group on Analytical Politics and Public Choice, which is active within ECPR, has created the Duncan Black Award. This award honors a graduate student who has presented the best paper at the ECPR Conference pursuing research in analytical politics which combines systematic theoretical thinking and rigorous empirical testing. The award carries a prize of 200 Euros.

For the 2007 General Conference in Pisa a committee of the standing group has selected

Nikoleta Yordanova

PhD student at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy, as the 2007 Award Winner. In her paper ‘Rationale behind committee assignments in the European Parliament: Distributive, informational and partisan perspectives’ she analyzes the factors that shape committee assignments. She finds that special interests drive the assignments to committees with high externalities, while expertise is important for assignments to committees on highly specialized issues. The award committee very much appreciated the theoretical reasoning in the paper, which was supplemented with an empirical test using new data on interest group affiliations of MEPs.
The next Duncan Black Award will be presented at the 2009 ECPR General Conference.

The Duncan Black Award Winner 2005

For the 2005 General Conference in Budapest a committee of the standing group has selected

Sandra Pogodda

PhD student at Cambridge University, as the 2005 Award Winner. In her paper ‘Reforming North Africa and the Middle East’ she analyzes the relationship between Western actors and North Africa and the Middle East. After discussing different explanations for the liberalization of authoritarian regimes, she carries out a time series analysis to empirically test these explanations. Her analysis shows that openness to trade is a driving force in political liberalization and not foreign aid. The award committee very much appreciated the combination of theory and empirical work in her paper.

Background of the Duncan Black Award

This award honours exemplary scholarship in analytical politics and public choice, emphasizing systematic theoretical thinking and rigorous empirical testing. The prize is dedicated to encourage graduate students to pursue innovative avenues of research in the tradition of the eminent Scottish researcher Duncan Black.

Web editor Public Administration
Last Modified: 15-09-2009