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September 16, 2024
Dear Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) user community,
We are very pleased to award the 2024 GESIS Klingemann Prize for the Best CSES Scholarship to “Patterns of Affective Polarization toward Parties and Leaders across the Democratic World”, published in the American Political Science Review and authored by Andres Reiljan of the University of Tartu in Estonia; Diego Garzia of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland; Frederico Ferreira Da Silva of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland; and Alexander H. Trechsel of the University of Lucerne in Switzerland. Congratulations!
The current year’s Selection Committee was comprised of: Noam Gidron of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, Rosario Queirolo of the Universidad Católica del Uruguay (Chair), and Jan-Lucas Schanze of the GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany. The Selection Committee described their selection of the winning work as follows:
Examining mass-level affect toward parties and their leaders, the Reiljan et al. paper brings together, both in its theoretical discussion and empirical research design, two lines of research that have so far developed separately: polarization and personalization. Another important contribution of this work is its broad geographical scope: while recent research on affective polarization has turned from the US-exclusive focus to a more comparative perspective, it is still often focused on Western democracies. In contrast, the study includes a diverse set of countries, ranging from Taiwan to Estonia. It is a comparative paper, showing Leader Affective Polarization and Party Affective Polarization among countries worldwide, helping us understand the relationship between presidential and parliamentary regimes. The authors make excellent use of CSES data, combining this data with additional context information. They draw several interesting findings, first and foremost, the persistence of the importance of party evaluations and the quality of regime output to avoid charismatic, polarizing leaders who claim to overthrow the existing political system. The connections drawn here between levels of affective polarization toward parties and leaders and institutional features such as party system fragmentation elegantly contribute to theoretical debates on polarization beyond its psychological underpinnings.
The CSES would like to thank the Selection Committee for their work and the many persons who nominated works for consideration. We furthermore thank the GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences for their sponsorship and support of the prize since its establishment in 2011.
Reiljan, Andres; Garzia, Diego; Ferreira Da Silva, Frederico; and Trechsel, Alexander H. (2024). Patterns of Affective Polarization toward Parties and Leaders across the Democratic World. American Political Science Review, Volume 118, Issue 2, pp. 654–70. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055423000485.