Home

Awarded for the best doctoral dissertation submitted in calendar years 2007 and 2008 in the field of American government and politics.

Award Committee: Marie Gottschalk, Chair, University of Pennsylvania; Samuel Popkin, Russell Sage Foundation; and Keith W. Reeves, Swarthmore College

Recipient: Traci Burch, Northwestern University

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

Dissertation Chair: Jennifer Hochschild, Harvard University

Citation: Traci Burch’s dissertation, “Punishment and Participation: How Criminal Convictions Threaten American Democracy,” is a fresh, original, and provocative analysis of the problem felon disenfranchisement.  Burch artfully and convincingly demonstrates how having a criminal conviction is a more significant factor in depressing voter turnout among offenders and ex-offenders than formal legal barriers to voting. Since people with convictions are concentrated within certain racial groups and certain geographic areas, mass imprisonment is creating a troubling phenomenon that Burch calls “concentrated disenfranchisement.” 

Burch’s work on the impact of mass incarceration on political and civic participation has enormous implications. It suggests that mass imprisonment may be rapidly cleaving off wide swaths of people in the United States from the promise of the American Dream, which some contend has served as a kind of societal glue holding together otherwise disparate groups. This is an engaging, far-reaching, yet disciplined dissertation that will leave an enduring mark on how we understand mass incarceration and its wider impact on American politics and society.