News: IQSS Fellow Earns Prestigious Political Science Award
by Sebastian Stockman, IQSS January 15, 2008
Dawn Brancati's question, "Decentralization: Fueling the Fire or Dampening the Flames of Ethnic Conflict and Secessionism?" caught the attention of the attendees at last year's American Political Science Association annual meeting.
How can we tell? The former Harvard-MIT Data Center Post-Doctoral Fellow and current Institute for Quantitative Social Science Fellow recently received the Franklin L. Burdette Award, which the APSA bestows annually on the best paper presented at the previous year's meeting.
During her two years as an HMDC Fellow, Dr. Brancati not only wrote the award-winning article (which will appear in the July issue of the journal International Organization), she also wrote two other articles and revised her doctoral thesis into a book.
"My experience at IQSS has really advanced my scholarship," Dr. Brancati said. "Through participation in workshops sponsored by the Institute, as well as one-on-one discussions with faculty members and various graduate students, I have tightened my statistical analyses and have been kept on my toes by people's excellent and insightful comments on my work."
Dr. Brancati, an Instructor in Social Studies, is only the second Harvard affiliate to have won the Burdette prize in the award's 42-year history. The other was Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor Samuel Huntington, who won in 1966 for his paper "Political Modernization: America vs. Europe."
The Burdette Award is supported by Pi Sigma Alpha, the national political science honor society, and the only honor society for graduate and upper-level undergraduate students of government in the United States. For the complete text of Dr. Brancati's article, visit http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~brancati/IO_final_oct05.pdf.