Newsletters Posted

The April and October 2011 Newsletters are available. Please access the links below.

APSA Business Meeting Notes

From left: Alan Renwick, Shaun Bowler, Anthony Downs, Josep Colomer

At this year's APSA business meeting, the section honored its award winners, selected a new chair, and continued the term of service for its Executive Committee. The section membership extends its gratitude to Shaun Bowler for his hard work and extensive accomplishments for the section, and welcomes Matt Golder as the new chair.

In addition to the traditional three awards for papers, articles, and books, the section added a dissertation award for 2012. This year's award winners were:

Weaver Award (tie):
Wendy Tam Cho (Illinois), James Gimpel (Maryland), and Iris Hui (UCLA/Cal-Berkeley). "Migration and Party Switching in the American Electorate."

Ian McAllister (Australian National University). "The Personalization of Election Campaigning within a Compulsory Voting System."

Longley Award:
David Sastavage (NYU). "When Distance Mattered: Geographic Scale and the Development of European Representative Assemblies." American Political Science Review 104 (4):625-643.

Hallett Award:
Anthony Downs. Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper, 1957.

We were privileged to have Professor Downs as a guest at our meeting. The text of Josep Colomer's remarks announcing the award are below.

An Economic Theory of Democracy is a seminal work. It is among the handful of most widely cited books in the entire field of political science and its impact continues to grow. This book has been immensely influential in the study of party strategies, voter choice, voter turnout, electoral system effects, and the role of information in politics. Many of its key ideas: ‘spatial’ party competition, two party convergence, the attraction of the median voter’s preference, rational ignorance, cues as information shortcuts, coalitions of intense minorities, have become part of the common stock of knowledge in the study of politics. Anthony Downs has achieved perhaps the highest accolade any academic can hope for; he has become an adjective. Even some questioned aspects of the ‘Downsian’ approach have sparked important theoretical inquiries and empirical investigations, as, for example, crucial individual decisions, such as whether to vote, for whom to vote, or which policy to choose, can be understood as strategic interactions depending on what other individuals are expected to do. Other extensions have spawned large literatures on topics such as multiparty competition, voting and elections over a multidimensional set of issues, agenda-setting, inter-institutional relations and, more generally, interactions among actors whose positions can be located within some policy ‘space’. Thousands of scholars over more than five decades have drawn inspiration from this book.


Thanks to Josep Colomer for the text and image. The Section also thanks the Georgetown University BMW Center for German and European Studies (CGES) and the University of California Center for the Study of Democracy (CSD) for sponsoring the APSA 2011 Hallet Award Lecture.

Big APSA Event

The Section Business Meeting will take place on Friday, September 2 from 6:15 pm-7:15 pm in the Convention Center Room 603. In addition to the regular agenda, we will be honoring Anthony Downs as this year's recipient of the Hallett Award. Please join us - and invite your colleagues (non members are welcome, too) - to meet and congratulate a seminal figure in our discipline.

New Section Bibliographer

Kathy S. Javian has been appointed Section Bibliographer. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Temple University. Her research includes work on elections and voting behavior, public opinion and responsiveness. Kathy's bibliographies will appear in the section's newsletter - please forward relevant publication information to her at ksjavian [at] temple.edu.

IPSA Research Committee on Elections, Citizens, and Parties

From Pippa Norris and Donley Studlar:

May 13, 2011
Announcing the new IPSA Research Committee 23 on Elections, Citizens and Parties (IPSA-ECP)We are delighted to announce that the International Political Science Association has just approved the establishment of a new Research Committee 23 on Elections, Citizens and Parties (IPSA-ECP).

This will replace IPSA's former RC 34 (Comparative Representation and Electoral Systems). As described in the attached note, IPSA-ECP is designed to cover the interests of the old committee, as well as broadening and updating the focus.

The new network will be launched at a special one-day pre-IPSA Workshop on the Challenges of Electoral Integrity in Madrid on 7th July 2012. We will also organize two regular general panels covering any topics about elections, citizens and parties at the IPSA Congress in Madrid from 8th-10th July 2012. The Call for Papers is attached, proposals are warmly welcomed, and the deadline for submissions is 1st July 2011.

We are also asking for your support to expand membership. There are no costs to joining for the first year and after July 2012 there will be a modest subscription fee, to subsidize activities. It would be greatly appreciated if you could go to www.ipsa-ecp.com to add your contact details to join and if you could spread the word and encourage membership among your research networks.

Please also forward the Call for Papers to colleagues and advanced graduate students. In a world rapidly moving towards elections as the main channel of political legitimacy for regimes worldwide, where the study of elections and parties is now truly global, the aim to is make sure that IPSA is at the forefront of scholarly research and scientific inquiry on elections, citizens and parties.

Longley Award Solicitation

An awards committee has been put together to find the best article published in 2010 dealing with issues of representation and electoral systems. The awards committee is chaired by Matt Golder (Penn State University), and includes Leslie Schwindt-Bayer (Missouri) and Garrett Glasgow (UCSB). The awards committee is looking for nominations; self nominations are welcome. If you have a paper to nominate, please email Matt Golder at mgolder@psu.edu. A short paragraph explaining why the nominated article is a good candidate for this award is appreciated. The deadline for nominations is May 15.

Call for Papers - EPOP 2011

[From POLMETH] EPOP 2011 - CALL FOR PANEL AND PAPER PROPOSALS We would like to invite proposals of complete panels or individual papers for the 2011 meeting of the Elections, Public Opinion and Parties (EPOP) section of the of the Political Studies Association, to be held at the University of Exeter (9-11 September 2011). We are interested in receiving proposals relating to any aspect of the fields of public opinion, elections and parties research, on the UK or with a comparative perspective. Our main interest is to feature quality, rigorous research regardless of methodological approach. Panel and Paper proposals should be submitted using the forms at http://www.exeter.ac.uk/epop2011/ . Please be sure to fill in all boxes. Incomplete proposals will not be accepted. If you are proposing a full panel please note that all proposed panels should have a minimum of three papers and a maximum of four. All panel proposals should be completed using the online form, including an abstract for each paper. If you are proposing a paper, please submit an abstract of no more than 200 words using the online form. Please visit http://www.exeter.ac.uk/epop2011/ for more details and to submit a paper proposal. EPOP is the largest specialist group of the Political Studies Association of the UK, bringing together people interested in the study of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties. The conference will be hosted by the Department of Politics and International Relations, and the Centre for Elections, Media and Parties at the University of Exeter. DEADLINE: Friday, 20 May 2011 EPOP 2011 Academic Conveners: Susan Banducci, Dan Stevens, Jack Vowles Department of Politics and International Relations University of Exeter email: epop2011@exeter.ac.uk