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For the best article published in the American Political Science Review during 2002.

Award Committee: Rachel Epstein, University of Denver, chair; Sanford F. Schram, Bryn Mawr College; and Stephen M. Walt, Harvard University.

Recipient: Mary Hawkesworth, Rutgers University

Article: "Congressional Enactments of Race-Gender: Toward a Theory of Raced-Gendered Institutions" (American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 4)

Citation: This year's Heinz Eulau Award Committee has selected Mary Hawkesworth's article, "Congressional Enactments of Race-Gender: Toward a Theory of Raced-Gendered Institutions," as the best article published in the American Political Science Review in 2003. This article examines the process through which legislative practices in the 103rd and 104th Congresses marginalize female members of color and therewith undermine this group's legislative interests and strategies. The committee was impressed by several features of Hawkesworth's study. She notably uses in-depth interviewing to highlight personal interactions operating in Congress that result in making race and gender sources of significant subject positions. These processes result in the structuring of hierarchies, the division of members into distinct groups predicated on racial and gender difference, and the construction of specific legislative agendas that stem directly from antagonistic social interactions. By addressing race and gender as processes, Hawkesworth's research is also suggestive how identities more broadly are constituted through political conflict.

The committee was also agreed on the political importance of "Congressional Enactments of Race-Gender." Through extensive use of interview material, the author forcefully conveys the personal experiences of female members of color as they confront condescension and prejudice on the part of their colleagues. At a time when formal access to American institutions, political and otherwise, is purportedly quite broad, this article shows how those same institutions threaten to perpetuate the marginalization of minority groups. A fresh look at race and gender dynamics in Congress promises to encourage creative thinking about how best to address problems of discrimination that are so graphically portrayed here.

This year's committee was also enthusiastic about two other articles that appeared in 2003. The first is Robert Pape's "The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," vol. 97, no. 3, which rejects conventional explanations for suicide bombing that revolve around religious fanaticism or psychological attributes. Rather, Pape points out that the growing incidence of suicide bombing and the widening range of perpetrators point to a strategic logic in which organizations that sponsor suicide bombing strive to coerce states to make territorial concessions. The second is Kevin Narizny's "Both Guns and Butter, or Neither: Class Interests in the Political Economy of Rearmament," vol. 97, no. 2. This article argues that leftist governments in three major Western democracies have been more likely than their right-leaning counterparts to resort to increased militarization in the face of external threats. Both of these studies address important questions in ways that convincingly challenge conventional wisdom.