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2007 William Anderson Award
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The William Anderson Award is given for the best dissertation in the area of intergovernmental relations, federalism, state, or local politics.
Award Committee: Thomas M. Carsey, Chair, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Michael Berkman, Penn State University; David Leal, University of Texas
Recipient: Ronald S. Smith, Hanover College
Dissertation Title: “Discerning Differences in Social Capital: The Significance of Interpersonal Network and Neighborhood Association Structure on Citizen Participation”
Dissertation Chair: Robert Huckfeldt, University of California, Davis
Citation: We are pleased to award the 2007 William Anderson award for the best dissertation in the area of intergovernmental relations, federalism, state, or local politics to Ronald S. Smith. Smith’s dissertation is a well-written study of how local context, including local neighborhood associations and other institutions, shape political participation. Smith’s work addresses a number of empirical and theoretical literatures revolving around the question of participation, including how both institutional and social/contextual influences shape citizen behavior. Smith weaves together a number of interesting theoretical threads from the public choice literature to de Tocquville and Madison with modern scholarship on social capital to provide a well-rounded picture of how the local environment influences participation. Smith goes a step further, however, by examining how the geographic concentration of a person’s larger social network conditions the impact of that network on that person’s subsequent political behavior. Similarly, the institutional arrangements within neighborhood associations affect how individuals living within them behave. Thus, Smith does not pit institutional, geographic, and social/contextual explanations against each other, but rather integrates these factors into a more complete and nuanced study of how the local environment operates on those living there. While Smith’s dissertation will interest scholars of sub-national, particularly local, politics, scholars interested in political participation and the role of social capital more broadly will be equally drawn to this work.
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