For the best book on government, politics, or international affairs.

Award Committee: Keith Dowding, London School of Economics; Cathie Jo Martin, Boston University; Ken Roberts, University of New Mexico, chair.

Co-recipient:  Kathleen Thelen, Northwestern University

Book:  How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan (Cambridge University Press)

Co-recipient: Steven I. Wilkinson, Duke University

Book:  Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India (Cambridge University Press)

Citation: Steven I. Wilkinson's Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India (published by Cambridge University Press in 2004) is a pathbreaking study of the effects of democratic competition on ethnic violence.  Placing the Indian case in a broad comparative perspective, Wilkinson examines how electoral competition at the local and state levels shapes politicians' incentives in ways that can inhibit or inflame Hindu-Muslim riots.  At the local level, electoral competition encourages elite-dominated ethnic parties to mobilize voters by employing wedge issues that polarize ethnic communities, thus increasing the probability of Hindu-Muslim violence.  Local effects, however, are generally trumped by state-level politics, since state governments control the police forces that are capable of containing communal violence.  And at the state level, electoral competition can have quite a different effect: it encourages Hindu politicians to appeal to Muslim voters by restraining ethnic violence, especially in states where minority groups are electorally pivotal.  Wilkinson's findings are backed by nuanced theoretical insights, meticulous research on patterns of communal violence, and rigorous empirical tests using both quantitative and qualitative methods.  He also compares his analysis with alternative approaches, such as state capacity and consociational explanations of variation in communal violence.  In the process, Wilkinson sheds new light on the highly conditional impact of democracy on ethnic conflict.  Altogether, this book is a superb example of rigorous empirical research conducted on an issue of considerable substantive and theoretical importance.

Kathleen Thelen's How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan (Cambridge University Press, 2004) is a landmark comparative historical analysis of institutional continuity and change.  Thelen begins with a puzzle: the German skills training system, originally designed by authoritarian rulers to weaken the labor movement, was ultimately embraced by workers and transformed into a pillar of social partnership.  She identifies this transformation as an example of incremental, yet ultimately monumental, institutional chance.  Institutions - whatever their origins --  are sites of permanent political contestation, and their supporting coalitions and functional roles may change through endogenous political dynamics.  Demonstrating how these processes of "layering" or "functional conversion" may cumulatively produce substantial transformations, Thelen makes a major contribution by offering a theoretical alternative to punctuated equilibrium and critical juncture explanations of institutional change.  Thelen supports these arguments with a sweeping survey of the origins and evolution of vocational skills training programs in Germany, Britain, Japan, and the U.S.  With both cross-sectional and longitudinal comparisons, she identifies different skills training models, illuminates the actors and interests that undergird their creation, and explores the dynamics of institutional transformation.  The theoretical implications of this book reach well beyond the confines of its subject matter; How Institutions Evolve is a seminal contribution to the study of institutional development and change across a broad range of political arenas.