Professor Robert Erikson and co-authors have been selected to receive the 2010 Philip Converse Award of the American Political Science Association Section on Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting. The award recognizes Statehouse Democracy by Erikson, Gerald C. Wright, and John P. McIver. It will be formally presented to the authors at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in September 2010.
The Selection Committee's formal statement follows.
"This book, published in 1993 by Cambridge University Press, was the culmination of a long and important research program on the democratic process in the U.S. states. The book explicated, first, an influential theory of how the democratic process worked in the states, linking the roles of mass opinion, elites, parties in government, and state legislatures. The relevance of state political cultures in this process was also explored, and some longitudinal evidence going back to the 1930s was advanced. The theoretical contribution of the book stimulated much subsequent research by other state politics scholars.
The book also presented new and valuable data on state public opinion for several time periods, mass partisanship in the states, elite policy preferences, and state public policy liberalism. These data have proved to be very valuable for other state politics scholars. Indeed, a wealth of subsequent scholarship by other researchers was only possible because of the creation of these measures and Erikson, Wright, and McIver's willingness to share them with the research community"
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