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The Heinz Eulau Award is 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. American Political Science Review Perspectives on Politics
Co-Recipients: Jack Citrin, Amy Lerman, Michael Murakami, University of California, Berkeley and Kathryn Pearson, University of Minnesota Title: “Testing Huntington: Is Hispanic Immigration a Threat to American Identity,” Citation: Citrin et al’s article tackles the extraordinarily important and timely issue of the consequences of Hispanic immigration for the U.S. The paper uses Huntington’s controversial and high-profile work on the ways in which Hispanic immigration constitutes a challenge to American identity as a springboard for the analysis. But the paper does not simply engage Huntington’s thesis via counter-argumentation. Rather, it carefully and creatively translates Huntington’s thesis into potentially falsifiable propositions that allow the authors to bring social science evidence to bear on the controversy. The authors present a creative research design, paying careful attention to theory specification, conceptual issues, controls, case selection and comparisons among relevant groups, employing multiple measures of concepts, and multiple data sets. Drawing upon a comprehensive set of survey data sets ranging from the Pew Hispanic Center’s Latino Surveys to the Los Angeles County Social Surveys as well as the American National Election Studies and the General Social Survey, the article provides evidence about generational patterns of bilingualism, identity choice, patriotism and ethnic identification. The data provide both sophisticated grounds for minimizing some aspects of the alleged threat to American national identity from Mexican immigration and important grounds for further pursuing other aspects of Huntington’s thesis. This article exemplified the qualities of a “best” article, which include the importance and breadth of the question addressed, boundary crossing between subfields (here, minimally between American and Comparative Politics), and imaginative research design.
Co-Recipients: James Habyarimana, Georgetown University, Macartan Humphreys, Columbia University, Daniel L. Posner, University of California, Los Angeles and Jeremy M. Weinstein, Stanford University Title: "Why Does Ethnic Diversity Undermine Public Goods Provision?" American Political Science Review, Volume101, No. 4, November 2007, pp.709-725 Citation: The article by Habyarimana et al., “Why Does Ethnic Diversity Undermine Public Goods Provision?” is a creative and sophisticated analysis of the psychology and sociology of ethnic politics. Using an innovative and multi-method research design, including an ambitious array of experiments conducted in a multi-ethnic Ugandan slum neighborhood, they shed new light on how ethnic identities promote or inhibit cooperation. Habyarimana et al. explore a variety of possible explanations for the greater ability of co-ethnics to cooperate and unpack why the provision of collective goods has been hindered by community-level ethnic diversity. They find no support for a set of plausible explanations, including shared preferences and group-specific altruism. In contrast, they find considerable support for the importance of norms and social networks in promoting cooperation. The authors’ carefully designed and occasionally ingenious experiments allow them to trace with unusual clarity how cooperation is achieved within ethnic communities. For example, they show not only that co-ethnics are especially likely to choose cooperative strategies in Prisoners’ Dilemma games, but also that defectors are especially likely to be punished by third parties in situations where all participants are from the same ethnic group. As Habyarimana et al., put it, “subjects in our sample anticipate punishment; they engage in sanctioning even at a cost to themselves; and they are most likely to punish players that fail to contribute to public goods when the non-contributors are co-ethnics.” In addition to representing a significant empirical contribution to the study of cooperation, “Why Does Ethnic Diversity Undermine Public Goods Provision?” is a pioneering application of experimental methods in the field of comparative politics. The authors employ a variety of familiar and unfamiliar experiments to explore the bases of cooperation, including Prisoners’ Dilemma, Dictator, puzzle games and a large-scale scavenger hunt testing subjects’ ability to locate randomly selected strangers in unfamiliar neighborhoods. (Subjects were significantly more likely to succeed in locating co-ethnics than members of other ethnic groups, suggesting that greater “findability” may contribute to the maintenance of cooperation within ethnic groups.) We believe that scholars for many years to come will find methodological inspiration as well as theoretical and empirical richness in this important work. |
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