2005 Award Winners

Best Instructional Web Site
The ITP section's Best Instructional Web Site award for 2005 went to IDEAlog at www.idealog.org. This year, the award was given for the simplicity and utility of the site. There are sites which may have much more information on a broader range of subjects, but IDEAlog's ability to raise important, nuanced issues on the specific topic of U.S. political ideology is worthy of recognition. The site is a simple test that students (and others) can take to identify their own political ideology, providing instructors the opportunity to address overlapping issues and to point out to students that ideology is not always clear cut.

The original version of the IDEALog program was released in 1989. It was inspired by "The World's Smallest Political Quiz," a computer program that explained the libertarian political philosophy. In 1992, IDEAlog won the Computer Software Award, Instructional Category, of the Computers and Multimedia Section of the American Political Science Association (ITP’s predecessor!). Indeed, Kenneth Janda and Jerry Goldman from Northwestern University are now 3-time award winners with a web site that permits professors to track class results, even over a number of iterations, to monitor ideological change. Since its inception, more than 1,000 classes and more than 10,000 students have visited IDEAlog. While other nominations were also strong, the committee decided to go with the web site it thought had the greatest immediate impact for political science instruction.

Best Research Software
The ITP section's Best Research Software award for 2005 went to The Virtual Data Center (VDC), a project founded by Micah Altman, Gary King, and Sidney Verba, and hosted by the Harvard-MIT Data Center: http://thedata.org

The VDC is broadly applicable to the needs of social scientists. The committee was very impressed with the interface and feature list, and it helps simplify a longstanding problem in the discipline. Ultimately, almost all political scientists who use quantitative data may end up relying on this uniquely useful piece of infrastructure.

The Virtual Data Center is a complete open-source, digital library system for the management, dissemination, exchange, and citation of virtual collections of quantitative data. The VDC functionality provides everything necessary to maintain and disseminate an individual collection of research studies: including facilities for the storage, archiving, cataloging, translation, and on-line analysis of a particular collection. The system provides extensive support for distributed and federated collections including: location-independent naming of objects, distributed authentication and access control, federated metadata harvesting, remote repository caching, and distributed ”virtual” collections of remote objects.

The long-term goal of the VDC project is to increase the replicability of research by providing a foundation for citation of quantitative data. The VDC system improves citation to data: by providing support for persistent, location-independent identifier, standardized metadata, and universal numeric fingerprints. VDC software is 'open source' and freely available for examination, modification, use, and redistribution, in support the principle that the fundamental infrastructure for research must be transparent. (http://thedata.org/)

Best Graduate Student Paper
The ITP section’s Best Graduate Student Paper award for 2005 went to Kathleen McNutt of Simon Fraser University. Her paper, "The Canadian Virtual State: E-Government Policy and Progress," provides a very thorough, balanced and well referenced analysis of e-government in Canada. It shows how Canadian e-government deserves its reputation as the 'best in the world' and its place at the top of consultancy and NGO rankings for several years, but also carefully outlines some key weaknesses in the country's e-government efforts, particularly in terms of responsiveness and democratic enhancement. While providing an excellent synthesis of research that has been carried out in this field, the paper also illustrates how political research and analysis more generally tends to ignore the impact of technological change.

Best Article
The ITP section's Best Article award for 2005 went to Kenneth Rogerson of Duke University. The growth of Internet-mediated activities worldwide implies a certain level of speed of communications, connectivity, and access to information, or so many believe. However, Ken Rogerson's International Politics article, "Talking Past Each Other: International Organization Internet Policy in the Developing World," provides a textual analysis suggesting that the deliberative and decision-making processes of the international organizations responsible for forging consensus and implementing actions have their wires crossed.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the article demonstrates that equality in representation does not necessarily translate into equality in access. Instead, at a critical time in world affairs when the lack of opportunity has shown to breed discord and terrorism, the failure of these institutions to enable infrastructure development disproportionately hinders the developing world's ability to get online while the developed world continues to move forward. Ken's findings, relevant to both theory building and policymaking, raise the question of whether developing countries will seek alternatives to currently established venues to achieve the goal of realizing the Internet's potential for their citizens. Continued research in this rich area of inquiry should prove useful in helping political scientists better understand the fluid changes taking place in the global political economy.