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CSES Announcement: Recipient of the 2012 GESIS Klingemann Prize for the Best CSES Scholarship
May 10, 2012
Dear CSES user community,
We are happy to announce that Russell J. Dalton, David M. Farrell and Ian McAllister are the 2012 winners of the GESIS Klingemann Prize for the Best CSES Scholarship for their book Political Parties and Democratic Linkage. How Parties Organize Democracy, published by Oxford University Press in 2011. The prize is awarded each year for the best CSES scholarship published in the calendar year prior to the award, and named in honor of Professor Hans-Dieter Klingemann, an internationally renowned political scientist, major contributor to comparative research, and co-founder of the CSES project.
The award committee, consisting of Professor Sara Hobolt, Professor Jeffrey Karp and Dr. Markus Quandt, were very impressed by the quality of the nominations for this year’s GESIS Klingemann Prize, but were unanimous in their decision that the Dalton, Farrell and McAllister book is a worthy winner. This book examines the role of parties in the process of democratic representation by analyzing each of the linkages between citizens and policy outcomes: the campaign linkage, the participatory linkage, the ideological linkage, the representative linkage and finally the policy linkage. It thus explores a fundamental question to the study of democracy, namely how do parties help organize the representation of citizens. In contrast to much of the recent literature that argues that parties are in decline, the book provides an impressive defense of the importance of parties by showing that they perform a crucial function in the democratic process, and that they continue to do so because of their ability to adapt to changing conditions. The book provides a substantively and theoretically important contribution to the literature on democratic politics. It can be expected to encourage further discussion about the role of parties in contemporary societies. It also presents an ideal showcase of the type of questions that can be answered with data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems program, and how they can contribute not only to scientific but also to societal debates. The lucid presentation of the data (both descriptive and statistical models) and the concise argumentation that ties together the different perspectives on democratic representation make this book very accessible to readers.
This year’s award ceremony will be held at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. The award ceremony will include both a reception and a presentation of their work by the prize recipients.
Our sincere thanks to this year’s Selection Committee. We would also like to thank all of you who make use of CSES in your work, and those of you who sent in nominations this year. Finally, we would like to express our great appreciation to the GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences for sponsoring the prize.
The GESIS Klingemann Prize for the Best CSES Scholarship is awarded for the best CSES scholarship (paper, book, dissertation, or other scholarly work, broadly defined) published or finalized in the calendar year prior to the award. The prize is named in honor of Professor Doctor Hans-Dieter Klingemann, an internationally renowned political scientist, major contributor to comparative research, and co-founder of the CSES project.