2004 Franklin L. Burdette/ Pi Sigma Alpha Award

For the best paper presented at the 2003 APSA Annual Meeting.

Award Committee: Joseph Carens, University of Toronto, chair; Eduardo Velasquez, Washington & Lee University; and Marc Blecher, Oberlin College.

Recipients: Larry W. Chappell, Mississippi Valley State University, and Bernard L. Bray, Talladega College.

Paper: "Civic Theatre for Civic Education"

Recipient: David Woodruff, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Paper: "Boom, Gloom, Doom: Balance Sheets, Monetary Fragmentation, and Financial Crisis in Argentina and Russia"

Citation: The committee determined that the 2004 Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha award for the best paper presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association should go jointly to two papers: "Civic Theatre for Civic Education," by Bernard L. Bray of Talladega College, and Larry W. Chappell of Mississippi Valley State University, and "Boom, Gloom, Doom: Balance Sheets, Monetary Fragmentation, and Financial Crisis in Argentina and Russia" by David Woodruff of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Professors Bernie Bray and Larry Chappell explore the relationship between theater and civic education. This is a relationship fraught with numerous complications, of which the authors are well aware. Chief among them is the tension between and among art, artist, artifact, and society. In what manner could we say that the arts are political, or serve the political ends of citizenship? And how do the political ends taught by art and artist bear on a society that is at least in principle pluralistic and culturally diverse? To be sure, the authors cannot accord equal time to all of the vexed questions insinuated above. That they make the reader aware of these questions, tensions and complications while simultaneously sustaining an argument that remains accessibly clear and persuasive we think is perhaps first among the many virtues of this paper. The authors also manage to scale and then command what is by any reasonable account a daunting precipice constituted by the literature of citizenship and civic engagement. And they do so by going back to the beginning, classical Greek and Modern European sources, while drawing the reader back to the immediate present. In other words, the paper is no mere survey of the written accounts of civic hermeneutics. Those written accounts are brought to bear on various suggestions concerning the use of theatre to address the various ills that now affect what we call (somewhat infelicitously) "civic discourse" and "social capital."

In "Boom, Gloom, Doom: Balance Sheets, Monetary Fragmentation, and Financial Crisis in Argentina and Russia", David Woodruff unearths the historico-political roots of financial crisis in Argentina and Russia, two countries which displayed extraordinary collapses in the 1990s. His theory explains why these states persisted in exchange rate based stabilization programs even after it became clear that these programs were not working. Specifically, he uses balance-sheet analysis to chart the development of institutional connections between creditors and debtors which systematically encouraged the growth of dollar liabilities and domestic currency assets. The political-economic institutions created a constituency for policy continuity that was deeply path-dependent - indeed, Woodruff calls it "locked-in." He also argues convincingly that the political dynamics swirling around exchange-rate issues are best understood as grounded not in fixed sectoral interests but, rather, in interests on exchange rates and price policy that flow from actors' specific positions in balance-sheet relationships. Finally, he demonstrates that the balance-sheet approach can explain why Argentina clung much harder and longer than Russia to fixed exchange rates, at great cost to its economy. Overall, David Woodruff does a wonderful job of linking a sophisticated financial analysis -- the balance-sheet approach -- with path dependency, all in the service of a convincing explanation of policy outcomes. His approach offers a promising tool for the analysis of monetary crises and policy responses in other cases past and future.