2021 Award
2021 Award for Concept Analysis in Political Science
The International Political Science Association’s Committee on Concepts & Methods (C&M) is pleased to announce the winner of its 2021 Award for Concept Analysis in Political Science. This award is given every three years for the best work in concept analysis, broadly defined. The award committee for the 2021 competition was composed of four distinguished scholars: Alisha Holland, Erica Simmons, Francisco Panizza, and Rodolfo Sarsfield.
The winner of the 2018 award is Lisa Wedeen (University of Chicago) for her book:
Wedeen, Lisa. 2019. Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria. University of Chicago Press.
Summary of the Award Committee's Evaluation
Authoritarian Apprehensions makes indispensable, innovative, and important conceptual contributions to our understandings of politics. Through a detailed theoretical and empirical analysis of authoritarian rule, resistance, and ambivalence in Syria, the book makes two important conceptual contributions. First, the book helps us to reconceptualize (neoliberal) authoritarianism and how it works in the contemporary world. Wedeen effectively undermines a common conception of authoritarianism that involves the importance of withholding information as a crucial part of domination. The book shows how an excess of information can be exploited by authoritarian regimes—too much information can generate uncertainty, siloed publics, and most interestingly, an alibi for suspending judgment when it would matter most politically.
It is the book’s contribution to our understanding of ideology, however, that is particularly pathbreaking. Wedeen builds on Althusser’s work on ideological interpellation to develop the concept of ideology as form. In doing so, she effectively shows how, instead of existing simply as a discrete doctrine or ethos, ideology works to structure our lifeworlds by operating through mechanisms of containment, displacement, and disavowal. Through careful empirical work, Wedeen reveals how ideology works through seductions—arousing fantasies but also defusing or containing them, much like advertising. Crucial to this conceptual innovation is the idea of ideology as displacement, making it possible for people to relocate fears onto a new object by transferring things that feel unacceptable onto a fantasy “other.” In this way, Wedeen argues, ideology operates by making social and historical anxieties seem natural and inevitable, generating conditions for resignation and thus political compliance. Most imaginative is her notion of disavowal--the “I know very well and yet nevertheless” ways in which people can know something and not know it at the same time. This account gets us away from false consciousness arguments while also moving scholars beyond the binary of belief and unbelief. It allows us to better understand why authoritarianism might be appealing not just to rulers but also, albeit in complicated but observable ways, to citizens. Through Wedeen’s fascinating analysis of “the ambivalent middle”—a demographic but also a way of orienting oneself--we see how ideology worked to secure regime buy-in from ordinary citizens in Syria.
Combined, Wedeen’s book is a crucial contribution to concept analysis as we all grapple with the changes that living in times of excess information have brought, and as we try to understand how these changes are related to increasing desires for and support of autocratic rule. The insights developed through Wedeen’s conceptualization of ideology relate to political trends around attractions to autocracy that are developing and strengthening all over the world. We will use and think about the concepts of authoritarianism and ideology very differently—and be better empowered to understand the present moment—as a result of this work.
Honorable Mentions. The committee also recognized two outstanding books that were also worthy.
Otero-Bahamon, Silvia. 2019. "Subnational Inequality in Latin America: Empirical and Theoretical Implications of Moving.” Studies in Comparative International Development
“Subnational Inequality in Latin America” shifts the study of inequality from its traditional focus on interpersonal inequality to subnational inequality, and from economic to social inequality. Focusing on Latin America, Otero-Bahamon develops the concept of subnational inequality and provides new measurement tools to compare subnational forms of inequality. The conceptual and measurement innovations help to reveal poorly understood differences in the evolution and rankings of subnational forms of inequality. These findings challenge our existing knowledge of
both the levels and the sources of inequality in Latin America and, more broadly, the concept and tools developed will help scholars rethink how we approach inequality.
Verghese, Ajay. 2020. "Taking Other Religions Seriously: A Comparative Survey of Hindus in India,” Politics and Religion.
“Taking Other Religions Seriously” uses the case of Hinduism to rethink common assumptions about how scholars define and measure religion comparatively. Verghese illustrates that the concept of religion and its measurement largely has developed through the lens of Abrahamic faiths. These categories fit poorly for Hinduism, the world’s third most populous religion. Verghese uses an innovative comparison of closed-ended and open-ended surveys about Hindu religiosity to reveal the limitations of common survey measures. Verghese uses careful attention to context and the open-ended answers provided by respondents to highlight how basic analytical categories, and even terms like “ritual”, make little sense to Hindu respondents. The findings challenge our academic understanding and prevailing survey methods to study religion, and push scholars to attend to the importance of context and meaning as they conceptualize and measure core concepts like religion.
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