Justine Davis and Martha Wilfahrt win the APCG Best Article Award

Justine Davis and Martha Wilfahrt win the APCG Best Article Award for their article titled “Enumerator Experiences in Violent Research Environment” published in Comparative Political Studies. The Award Committee noted:

"This paper focuses on how enumerators experience insecurity and physical and material challenges when collecting public opinion data,especially in post-conflict settings and on topics related to violence. Drawingon a survey of over 200 enumerators from the three largest survey companies inCôte d’Ivoire, Davis and Wilfahrt convincingly show how enumerators play an important brokerage role that is often overlooked and how enumerators’ own senseof insecurity or discomfort leads them to sometimes make compromises in the field that may in fact affect data integrity. More importantly, the authors underscore how the well-being of local enumerators is often overlooked by researchers, and they proactively offer suggestions to help rectify this going forward. By drawing on the rarely used questions from Afrobarometer about enumerator perceptions, they further broaden the external validity of their analysis beyond a post-conflict country. We fully agreed with the authors’ insightful claim that “the challenges of running surveys in insecure environments cannot be resolved by clever research designs or question wording alone,” reminding all of us in the social sciences to remain respectful and cognizant of the important human element to data collection processes despite continued advances in survey collection technology."

The Committee also awarded two Honorable Mentions to Soeren Henn for his paper titled “Complements or Substitutes? How Institutional Arrangements Bind Traditional Authorities and the State in Africa,” and Thalia Gerzso for her paper titled "Judicial Resistance during electoral disputes: Evidence from Kenya." The Award Committee stated:

"Henn’s article examines variation in the distribution of power between the central state and traditional authorities inAfrica and how that affects when and how services are provided to localcommunities. He argues that when traditional authorities and the state are complements to each other—captured by whether authorities are recognized in thenational constitution—higher (lower) state capacity will also increase (decrease)services provided by traditional authorities. However, when they are substitutes, traditional authorities’ influence on local service provision is stronger when state capacity is lower and vice versa. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design, an original dataset of 5700 administrative unit boundaries and headquarters across 28 African countries, and geocoded data from Demographic and Health Surveys, Henn employs a sophisticated research design to help control for various sources of endogeneity. The article helps advance our understanding about variations in capacity, local governance and service provision across much of the continent, with important implications for whose capacity donor and civil society practitioners should support when trying to improve the delivery of development projects."

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"Gerzso’s article focuses on how judiciaries become stronger forms of horizontal accountability in Africa, even in hybrid regimes. As a wonderful example of within-case process tracing methodology, spanning 1992 to 2020, Gerzso combines qualitative data from 24 semi-structured interviews with Kenyan judges, clerks, lawyers, and activists and descriptive statistics from 224 electoral disputes that she hand-coded. Her analysis shows how critical reforms in the 2010constitution enhanced the judiciary’s independence and, critically, traces how networks of judicial activists became stronger, more experienced, and more confident in pursuing cases over time that challenged the incumbent administration. She extends the analysis to Malawi for external validity.Overall, we felt that given the growth in the use of “lawfare” to adjudicate election results—in Africa and globally—understanding how to institutionalize and deepen judicial independence is a crucially important topic, and this article advances our understanding of how to do this effectively."

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Congratulations to our winners!

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