News

Condolences on behalf of the Standing Group

We have been shocked and saddened to learn that Professor Mika Widgrén (Turku School of Economics, Finland) unexpectedly passed away on 16 August 2009 during a conference trip to South Africa. The members of the Analytical Politics and Public Choice Group send their sincere condolences to Mika's family. We will miss him as a good colleague and a friend.

Message to members

Dear members:

I would like to give you an update on the meeting we had at the 2009 ECPR General Conference in Potsdam:

summer schools The group will apply for a new cycle of three summerschools after the two cycles we already had. The new summer schools will include Barcelona (Josep Colomer/2011), Oslo (Bjorn Hoyland/2012), and Kostanz (Gerald Schneider) as backup. We also hope that one of the next summer schools in Mannheim (Thomas König) can be included in the APPC summer school cycle. Bernard will discuss this with Thomas.

next conference At the next General Conference we hope to organize a set of panels, like the ones at the 2009 conference. The latter were very successful in terms of attendence and the number of presented papers (thanks to Frank Häge, Bjorn Hoyland and Andreas Duer for making these panels possible). I may take the initiative the moment a call comes out.

update membership The group will keep and updat a list of email addresses of its members. New members are invited to send their email to Dimiter Toshkov (as long as the group is administered in Leiden) en later to Simon Hug. Changes of addresses are also welcome.

The Ducan Black prize The prize was awarded to the paper "Labour markets and representative institutions: Evidence from Colonial British America" by Elena Nikolova (the award committee wrote the following on this paper: In her paper entitled "Labour markets and representative institutions: Evidence from Colonial British America" 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.

leadership We discussed a change in leadership since I have been chair of the group for many years. Simon Hug indicated his willingness to be chair for a number of years, which was supported by the group members that were present. Simon address is: Simon Hug Département de science politique, Université de Genève, 40, Bd du Pont d'Arve, 1211 Genève, Switzerland, email: simon.hug@unige.ch, tel: +41 22 379 89 47, fax: +41 22 379 83 64.

With best regards, and many thanks for your help over the years in supporting the group,

Bernard

Winner of the Duncan Black Award 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.

2009 Summer School

The 2009 Summer School of the ECPR Standing Group on Analytical Politics and Public Choice will take place in Turin in September 2009. The venue of the Summer School will be the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Moncalieri (Turin, Italy).

The school will be run by the Graduate School in Social, Economic and Political Sciences of the University of Milan, headed by Maurizio Ferrera. It will be under the auspices of the Research Unit on European Governance (URGE) of the Collegio Carlo Alberto, a research centre directed by Maurizio Ferrera and Stefano Sacchi and dedicated to the study of European governance from a political science and political economy perspective.

More information about the summer school.

EITM Summer School Europe at Mannheim 2009

The first Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models (EITM) Summer School Europe, founded in collaboration with Washington University St. Louis, will take place from 29th of June to 10th of July 2009 at Mannheim University.

Please use the Mannheim University website for further information.

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Last Modified: 30-10-2009