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Awarded for the best doctoral dissertation submitted in calendar years 2006 and 2007 in the field of American government and politics.

Award Committee: William E. Nelson, Jr., Chair, Ohio State University; Bruce E. Cain, University of California, Berkeley; Louis DeSipio, University of California, Irvine

Recipient: Daniel J. Hopkins, Harvard University

Dissertation: “When Differences Divide: How National Influences and Local Demographics Shape Politics Between Ethnic Groups”

Dissertation Chair: Robert D. Putnam, Harvard University

Citation: For the 2008 E.E. Schattschneider Award, the committee recommends Daniel J. Hopkins’ “When Differences Divide: How National Influences and Local Demographics Shape Politics Between Ethnic Groups.”  “When Differences Divide” analyzes how intergroup political tension varies over time and space.  The committee was particularly impressed with its multi-method approach that relies on a range of historical and contemporary data sources.  It was also impressed with "When Differences Divide"'s efforts to assess both race and ethnicity, particularly ethnicity driven by new immigration, in an effort to develop a comprehensive theory of national and local influences on intergroup relations.

Hopkins contends that local racial and ethnic cleavages are likely to be a source of political division when two conditions are present: rapid local ethnic or racial demographic change and b) the introduction of frames that politicize this demographic change.  These frames are often introduced from national politics or the media, but see their effect at the community level.  In both cases, these conditions reflect the information environments of local residents in multi-racial/multi-ethnic communities.

To test his hypothesis, Hopkins looks at four case studies: the post-Katrina migration as an unanticipated shock to local demographics testing the differential effects of living near evacuees, communities with growing immigrant populations in the 1990s and early 2000s to test the prevalence of anti-immigrant ordinances, city spending from the 1960s to the 1990s to test spending on police and other local criminal justice activities, and votes on Massachusetts tax proposals to measure the relationship between community-level diversity and public investment.  Each of these case studies highlights that ethnic and racial differences become politicized only under certain conditions.  This finding, reinforced as it is across time and between native (non-Hispanic) whites and different racial, ethnic, and immigrant populations offers a caution to models of intergroup relations constructed primarily around notions of racial threat.

We are enthusiastic in our support for Daniel J. Hopkins’ “When Differences Divide: How National Influences and Local Demographics Shape Politics Between Ethnic Groups” as the recipient of the 2008 E.E. Schattschneider Award.  It offers contributions to scholarship about American politics broadly and more specifically to debates in urban politics, racial and ethnic politics, and political behavior.

Professor Hopkins completed his dissertation in 2007 and is serving as a lecturer in the Harvard University Department of Government and Committee on Degrees in Social Sciences. He has also held a post-doctoral fellowship at Yale University.