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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:  Robert Nakamura, Chair, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs, University at Albany SUNY; Kathleen Bratton, Louisiana State University

Recipient: Traci Renee Burch, Harvard University

Dissertation Title:  “Punishment and Participation: How Criminal Convictions Threaten American Democracy”

Dissertation Chair:  Jennifer Hochschild, Harvard University

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 Traci Renee Burch.  Burch’s dissertation is an exploration into the political impact of our country’s increased reliance on prisons to deal with crime.  While others have explored the benefits of this strategy, in declining crime rates, Burch examines the potential costs.  Those costs, she argues, are in the form of lessons that diminish participation not only for those convicted of crimes but also for those who are close to them as families, neighbors and communities.  The greatest impact, she argues, comes with concentration effects in black communities which see participation depressed in small but potentially significant ways as elections grown more competitive.   While developing this broad argument, Burch tackles a series of more specific issues including the impact of disenfranchisement laws which she finds to have less of a partisan impact than previously assumed largely due to the preponderance of white over black disenfranchised felons.  These and other arguments are tested against a large data set that permits her to disentangle the effects of conviction from the other attributes of race, age, education and other factors.