Recipient: Daniel Ziblatt, Harvard University

Dissertation: "Constructing a Federal State: Political Development, Path Dependence, and the Origins of Federalism in Modern Europe, 1815-1871"

Dissertation Chair: Kenneth Jowitt, University of California, Berkeley

Citation: The committee had a very difficult choice to make among several excellent dissertations. This year's winner, Daniel Ziblatt, links political economic, institutional, and cultural analysis in his inquiry into the origins of federalism in Germany and Italy. His main argument offers a counter to mainstream Rikerian rational choice approaches to federalism, which assume that leaders with political economic and/or military power would always prefer to create unitary states, and agree to federalism only where the periphery has substantial balancing power over the center. Instead, Ziblatt demonstrates that neither central power nor leaders' ideas or national culture alone can explain federal outcomes. Rather, sub-national institutional capacity is a much better predictor of federal or unitary institutions. In the case of Germany, although the Prussian leadership had the military and political economic power to impose a unitary state, it preferred a negotiated federal settlement because it better met foreign and domestic policy concerns. But this settlement was possible only because the regional states had the institutional capacity to negotiate as well as to administer such a settlement. In the case of Italy, although the leadership would also have preferred a negotiated settlement, the lack of institutional capacity of the regional states, internally weak and/or foreign controlled, made the military imposition of a unitary state ruled from Piedmont inevitable.

This dissertation is rich in qualitative discussion of the ideas, history, and cultural heritage of both countries as well as in quantitative measures of political economic and military power. As such, it represents the best of the current trend toward using a mix of methods to make a strong empirical case that provides significant theoretical insights into questions central to the field of comparative politics.