|
|
 |
home
› About APSA
› Awards
› Paper & Article Awards
2007 Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award
|
 |
The Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award is awarded annually for the best paper presented at the previous year's annual meeting. Supported by Pi Sigma Alpha.
Award Committee: Thomas Hammond, Michigan State University, Chair; Joanne Gowa, Princeton University; and Gary M. Segura, University of Washington
Co-Recipients: Dennis Chong and James Druckman, Northwestern University
Title: “Democratic Competition and Public Opinion”
Citation: In their original, insightful, and comprehensive effort, Professors Chong and Druckman use experimental data collected from two disparate populations to examine the effects of elite issue framing on mass public opinion.
Since the mid 1980s, but echoing concerns Walter Lippmann and others expressed long ago, political scientists have grown increasingly concerned that asymmetries in political communication between elites and masses undermine democracy. In this view, political elites offer frames that shape the understanding of policy issues and influence the preferences of the mass public. Thus, political elites may drive mass opinion.
The authors ask whether competition among different frames can attenuate the impact of any single frame, as well as whether it is the persuasive content of the frame itself or merely its repetition that exerts a stronger effect on the views of the mass public. To examine these issues, the authors devised an experiment that manipulates the impact of frame content, strength, frequency, and the existence of alternative frames.
Their results are both impressive and provocative. Using two distinct issues—urban growth regulation and extremist or hate-group protests—the paper shows that frame strength matters more than its repetition. Most importantly, the paper shows that if political elites are competing with each other, mass opinion is not easily manipulated. There appear to be important constraints on the success of elite framing efforts: subjects did not change their views easily, they seldom responded to weak frames, and they responded to competing strong frames deliberately and carefully. In sum, competition clearly diluted the framing effect, thereby preserving an independent role for the mass public in democratic deliberation.
This outstanding paper is a wonderful model of how experimental research can illuminate our understanding of the age-old problem of the extent to which political elites can control or manipulate mass behavior.
Co-Recipients: Kenneth Scheve, Yale University and David Stasavage, New York University
Title: “Political Institutions, Partisanship, and Inequality in the Long Run”
Citation: In their provocative and extremely well-written paper, Professors Scheve and Stasavage use newly-collected data on the income share of the top 10 percent of the population in 13 advanced industrialized countries to test conventional wisdom about the determinants of income inequality.
The authors argue persuasively that the existing literature rests on tenuous foundations. Prominent among its findings are that centralized systems of wage bargaining, leftist governments, and proportional-representation systems depress inequalities in the distribution of income. As the authors point out, however, these studies typically examine data that begin only in the early 1970s. Thus, they cannot adequately test whether institutional changes actually led to changes in the distribution of income.
The authors use new data about income inequality that begin in 1900. They straightforwardly explain that these data only allow them to construct an indicator of the income share of the top 10 percent of the population and that they cannot separate out wage and capital income for all countries. They are also, however, careful to show that limiting their analyses to the years since 1970 produces results that are very similar to those in the existing literature.
In sharp contrast to that literature, however, the authors show that a marked downward trend in income inequality actually began after the Great Depression. They also show that the introduction of more centralized wage bargaining in several countries had no significant effect on inequality over the long run. The same is true of government partisanship and proportional-representation systems.
This paper is a crystal-clear analysis of a very important issue that has been long debated in the comparative politics literature. In bringing historical data to bear on a question of great contemporary relevance, it reverses the conventional wisdom about the causes of inequality. It is a model of social science research that promises to begin a highly productive debate about whether we can only understand income inequality if we are willing to rethink its most basic causes.
|
