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Harold D. Lasswell Award

Nominations are closed.

The Lasswell Award honors the best doctoral dissertation in the field of public policy.

The award, co-supported by the Policy Studies Organization and the APSA Organized Section on Public Policy, is presented at the APSA Annual Meeting and carries a cash prize of $1,000.

Nomination Information

Eligibility: Nominees do not have to be members of APSA, affiliated with an institution in the United States, or an American citizen in order to be considered for an award.

Dissertations must have been successfully defended within the previous two calendar years (dissertations for the 2023 award must be defended in 2021 or 2022).

Self-nominations are accepted. Nominations from non-PhD departments and institutions are also welcome if the nominee is currently employed there.

APSA will accept up to two nominations for the Lasswell Award per school or political science department.

Harold D. Lasswell Award Committee

Chair: Harold Pollack
University of Chicago
[email protected]

Mr. Paasha Mahdavi
University of California, Santa Barbara
[email protected]

Ana Catalano Weeks
University of Bath
[email protected]

Listing of Awardees

Year	Author	Dissertation	Submitted by
2022	Margaret Brower	How She Reconfigures the State: Intersectional Advocacy & The movement to End Violence	University of Chicago
2021	Guillermo Toral	The Political Logics of Patronage: Uses and Abuses of Government Jobs in Brazil	MIT
2020	Shiran Victoria Shen	Political Pollution Cycle: An Inconvenient Truth and How to Break It	Stanford University
2019	Natália S. Bueno	The Distributive Politics of Non-State Welfare Provision	Yale University
2018	Jonathan Mummolo	Modern Police Tactics, Police-Citizen Interactions, and the Prospects for Reform	Princeton University
2017	Alexander Hertel-Fernandez	Whose Bills? Corporate Interests and Conservative Mobilization Across the States	Harvard University
2016	Brian Palmer-Rubin	Evading the Patronage Trap: Interest Organizations and Policymaking in Mexico	University of California, Berkeley
2015	Michael Hartney	Turning Out Teachers: The Causes and Consequences of Teacher Political Activism in the Postwar United States	University of Notre Dame
2014	Sarah Anzia	Election Timing and the Political Influence of the Organized	Stanford University
2013	Nicholas Carnes	By the Upper Class, For the Upper Class? Representational Inequality and Economic Policymaking in the United States	Princeton University
2012	Christopher G. Faricy	The Politics of Public Versus Private Social Welfare	University of North Carolina
2011	Jennifer Kavanagh	The Dynamics of Protracted Terror Campaigns: Domestic Politics, Terrorist Violence, and Counterterror Responses	University of Michigan
2010	Karen Long Jusko	The Political Representation of the Poor	University of Michigan
2009	Michael Schoon	Building Robustness to Disturbance: Governance in Southern African Peace Parks	Indiana University
2008	Christian Breuing	Institutions, Attention Shifts, and Changes within National Budgets	University of Washington
2007	Vanda Felbab-Brown	Shooting Up: The Impact of Illicit Economies on Military Conflict	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2006	Jonathan Ari Laurence	Managing Transnational Religion: Muslims and the State in Western Europe (1974-2004)	Boston College
2005	Esther N. Mwangi	Institutional Change and Politics: The Transformation of Property Rights in Kenya's Maasailand	International Food Policy Research Institute
2005	Thad Williamson	Sprawl, Justice, and Citizenship: A Philosophical and Empirical Inquiry	Harvard University
2004	Suzanne Christine Nielsen	Preparing for War: The Dynamics of Peacetime Military Reform	Harvard University
2003	Kristin Anne Goss	Disarmed: The Real American Gun Control Paradox	Harvard University