ANU political scholarship recognised at 2021 APSA Awards

Talented scholars past and present from the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences have been recognised for their research excellence and contribution to political study at the 2021 Australian Political Studies Association awards.

The PhD Thesis Prize was awarded to Dr Lars Moen, for his thesis The Republican Dilemma: Liberating Republicanism, Sacrificing Pluralism. The judging panel praised Moen’s thesis for demonstrating “an academic maturity that is exceedingly rare from a PhD scholar,” and for providing “a highly original and sophisticated argument of considerable importance for the challenges faced by contemporary liberal democracies.” Dr Moen completed his PhD at ANU in 2020, supervised by Keith Dowding (chair) and Philip Pettit. He is a graduate of the University of Oxford where he completed a postgraduate study in political theory, and the University of Auckland where he earned a Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours.

PhD candidate Michael Kumove was awarded the Postgraduate Conference Paper Prize for his work Imagining the ‘other’ – how does outgroup trust affect generalised trust? Judges praised this important contribution to the literature on social capital, and its assumption that outgroup trust affects generalized trust, and in particular that low trust in outgroups bleeds into low generalised trust. Using surveys from Croatia and the United States, the paper finds that this is not the case, thus supporting a strong prima facie argument that low trust in an outgroup does not cause individuals to be less trusting overall.

The Executive Committee recognised the remarkable contributions of the late Professor Marian Simms, awarding her the Lifetime Achievement Award. The award commemorates her efforts transforming the Association for the better from a gender equality perspective.

Dr Sarah Cameron was awarded the Mayer Journal Prize for her article in the Australian Journal of Political Science, ‘Government Performance and Dissatisfaction with Democracy in Australia’. Dr Cameron completed her PhD at ANU in 2017, and is a lecturer and research at the University Sydney. She is an investigator on the ARC Discovery Project Political Trust and Satisfaction with Democracy in Australia. The judges praised the rigorous analysis and convincing articulation of data from the Australian Election Study (based at ANU) with showing the broader implications of leadership churn to the health of Australian democracy.

Feodor Snagovsky, Dr Jill Sheppard and Dr Nick Biddle with colleague Dr Woo Chang Kang from Korean University received a Highly Commended in the same category for their article in the Australian Journal of Political Science, ‘Does Descriptive Representation Increase Perceptions of Legitimacy’. The judging panel praised the originality and innovative methodology of the paper, which also uses data from the ANU based Australian Election Study. The paper combines this with a conjoint experiment to develop a deeper understanding of the relationship between the representation of ethnic minorities and political efficacy.