2007 Heinz I. Eulau Award

For the best article published in the American Political Science Review and Perspectives on Politics during the previous calendar year. Two Eulau Awards are made, one for each journal.

Award Committee:
John D. Huber, Chair, Columbia University

Perspectives on Politics
Bernard N. Grofman, University of California, Irvine and Stathis N. Kalyvas, Yale University

American Political Science Review
Louise K. Comfort, University of Pittsburgh and James D. Fearon, Stanford University, Bernard N. Grofman, University of California, Irvine and Stathis N. Kalyvas, Yale University

Recipient: Jonas Pontusson, Princeton University

Title: “The American Welfare State in Comparative Perspective: Reflections on Alberto Alesina and Edward L. Glaeser, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe,” Perspectives on Politics, Volume 4, Issue 02, June 2006, pp 315-326

Citation:  Jonas Pontusson’s critical essay on Alberto Alesina and Edward L. Glaeser’s Fighting Poverty in the U.S. and Europe, while ostensibly an extended book review, is in fact a brilliant exposition on how comparative historical analysis can shape our understanding of long standing issues such as claims about the nature and causes of U.S. exceptionalism.  Drawing on quantitative data, along with outstanding command of the historical terrain, Pontusson uses his essay to question core arguments in the literature about how cross-national differences in welfare state efforts are explained by factors such as electoral laws, the strength of socialist parties, and, in the U.S., by additional factors such as large geographic area, immunity from foreign occupation, and ethnic heterogeneity. By highlighting historical differences in relative levels of welfare state efforts, he forces scholars to think carefully about the micro-foundations of their arguments. He also makes a powerful argument for the careful consideration of historical dynamics in understanding the politics of the welfare state, and about the need to more carefully disentangle complex threads of causality and interaction effects by identifying mechanisms through which outcomes are produced. 

Recipients: Daron Acemoglu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and James A. Robinson, Harvard University

Title: "Economic Backwardness in Political Perspective," American Political Science Review, Volume 100, Issue 01, February 2006, pp 115-131

Citation:  Why do some political elites adopt policies that seem clearly designed to impede economic growth? For years, political scientists have answered this question by arguing that political elites often pursue bad economic policies in order to stay in power. Acemoglu and Robinson provide a fresh perspective on this argument in at least two important respects.

First, Acemoglu and Robinson provide a novel perspective on the question itself by highlighting a "Coasian puzzle" that is inherent to the claim that politicians pursue bad economic policy to stay in power. Coase famously argues that any social investment that increases overall societal well-being will be carried out if nothing prevents the parties involved from bargaining and making side payments over the distribution of the gains. Or, put differently, political elites should adopt growth-oriented reforms because doing so will allow them to reap the benefits of a bigger tax base. That they do not implies an interesting failure of the Coase logic, one that demands a theoretical response. 

Second, Acemoglu and Robinson's theory demonstrates how a commitment problem inherent to political competition can help explain incentives to block policy innovation. Economic reforms can be risky because they often have the unintended consequence of empowering new groups in society, thereby putting at risk the political survival of incumbent elites. If the groups that are so empowered could commit not to punish or replace the incumbent elites, there would be no problem. But such commitment is impossible, and so incumbent politicians may block reforms that risk increasing the power of potential opponents. The nature of political competition is therefore crucial to understanding the severity of the commitment problem. At the extremes, when elites are either highly vulnerable or highly invulnerable to replacement, policy innovations will pose the least risk.  But at intermediate levels of competition, blocking innovation will often be sufficient to ensure survival. Acemoglu and Robinson’s theory therefore provides clear theoretical predictions about when politics is most likely to impede economic development.

This article should become a new point of departure in theorizing and empirical research on the politics of economic development. And given the deep and seemingly intractable problem of uneven prosperity around the world, the article should be of broad interest to all political scientists concerned about growing inequalities between nations.