Prizes and Awards

EUI's Linz Rokkan Prize Awarded to Ilias Ntinas

Ilias Ntinas (Department of Politcal and Social Sciences) was awarded the first Linz Rokkan Prize for the best EUI thesis in the field of political sociology engaging with a theme in the broadly defined fields of the works of  Juan Linz and Stein Rokkan.

The title of his thesis, defended in 2010,  is: "The Impressionable Years: the Formative Role of Family, Vote and Political Events during Early Childhood".

Ilias received his award at the Annual Conferring Ceremony on 10 June 2011.

In 2009, Ilias  was also awarded the John Sullivan Award for the best paper presented by a graduate student on an Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behaviour Panel at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Political Sciences Association.

Donatella Della Porta

Donatella della Porta  has been awarded the Fondation Mattei Dogan   and European Consortium for European Research  (ECPR)  Prize in European Political Sociology for 2011. The Prize Jury stated that her "work across a whole range of key sub-fields in the discipline (civil society, political violence, policing and public order, terrorism, and most prominently social movements) as well as professional engagement as the coordinator of several European research projects (on democratization, contentious politics and social activism) greatly impressed the jury and affirmed the high standards of this prestigious award".

Nicolas Chaignot

Nicolas Chaignot (Ph.D. 2010)  has been awarded the prize "Le monde de la recherche universitaire" in the human and social sciences categoria, for the 14th edition (2010-2011) organized by the French newspaper "Le monde". This prize rewards his Ph.D. Thesis "Esclavages et modernités: la servitude volontaire comme problématique du capitalisme contemporain" (abstract ).

Luis de la Calle Robles and Sergi Pardos Prado

Luis de la Calle Robles  (Ph.D. 2009) received the Juan J. Linz prize for 2009-2010 awarded by the Political and Constitutional Studies Centre  in Spain for his dissertation entitled "Accounting for Nationalist Violence in Affluent Countries".

On the same occasion another former EUI researcher, Sergi Pardos Prado  (Ph.D. 2010), received the Special Mention for this prize. Sergi's doctoral thesis was entitled: "Beyond Radical Right: Attitudes towards Immigration and Voting Behaviour in Europe".

http://www.cepc.es/es/Investigacion/Premios_nueva/Premio_Juan_Linz.aspx 

Sven Steinmo 

The 2011 Gunnar Myrdal Prize,  is awarded to "The Evolution of Modern States:  Sweden, Japan and the United States " by  Sven Steinmo, (Cambridge University Press, 2010). This impressive monograph on the comparative history of Japan, Sweden and the United States draws on insights from evolutionary approaches to make up for important shortcomings in the existing literature on political economy, globalization and historical institutionalism. With this breathtaking synthesis of the complex challenges of a fast changing globalizing world, Sven Steinmo helps us to challenge the conventional convergence view to explore how those three different capitalist democracies have evolved along different trajectories that allow them to respond differently to globalization.

 Jean-Christophe Graz, European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy, EAEPE Prize Committee Coordinator

Sven Steinmo 

The 2011 European Research Council Advanced Grant has been awarded to Sven Steinmo, for his project "Willing to Pay? Testing Historical Institutionalism with Experiments".

The project will combine experimental techniques and methodologies with classical historical analysis in order to test and explore the relationships between institutions, policy regimes and citizen’s policy choices in different welfare states. The research will extend the current work in experimental economics and cognitive science by designing experiments that are modeled on real world institutions and policy choices in several different countries.

The research will focus on two sets of redistributive policy issues: Taxation and public pensions in five democratic nations: Sweden, Italy, Britain, Hungary and the United States. The basic point will be to build a series of scenarios that will allow us to test how different institutional contexts frame or shape citizens’ decisions and thereby better understand how they perceive and process different policy choices and trade-offs.

Manuele Citi

Manuele Citi (Ph.D. 2009) was awarded a fellowship for independent research in the social sciences (FSE) offered by the Danish Research Council . He will take up his position in February 2011 for a duration of 2 years

Tiago Fernandes

Tiago Fernandes (Ph.D. 2009) was awarded the best Ph.D. dissertation prize by a Portuguese in the last two years (Portuguese Political Science Association)

His current affiliation: research and teaching Fellowship (2009-2011) at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, USA.

Chris Hanretty

Chris Hanretty (Ph.D. 2009) has been awarded the François Mény Prize for the Best Comparative Study of European Institutions for his dissertation entitled "The Political Independence of Public Service Broadcasters".

Costanza Hermanin

Costanza Hermanin won a Fulbright Fellowship that she takes up in December 2010 for a duration of ten months.

Ilias Ntinas

Ilias Ntinas (Ph.D. 2010) has been awarded the John Sullivan Award for the best paper presented by a graduate student on an Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behaviour Panel at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Political Sciences Association.

Thomas Paster

Thomas Paster (Ph.D, 2009) received the Erwin-Wenzl-Prize 2010 for his PhD thesis. The prize is  awarded by the St. Magdalena Educational Centre by the  government of Upper Austria. He is one of six laureates, selected among 192 nominations from all disciplines. The prize is awarded for outstanding work by researchers from Upper Austria.

In his thesis, which he defended at the European University Institute in June 2009, he investigated under which conditions German employers accepted social policy reforms. He is currently working as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany.

Chiara Ruffa

Chiara Ruffa won a Fulbright Fellowship that she will take up in December 2010 for a duration of ten months.

Adrienne Héritier

Adrienne Héritier was elected Chair of the European Union Studies Association (EUSA) at the Marina del Rey Conference for the period 2009-2011.

Frédéric Mérand and Antoine Vandemoortele

 Frédéric Mérand and Antoine Vandemoortele (Ph.D. candidate)« L'Europe dans la culture stratégique canadienne, 1949-2009 », Etudes internationales, volume XL, no 2.

Recipient, inaugural Paul-Painchaud award  for best article published in the journal Etudes internationales in 2009

http://www.hei.ulaval.ca/publications/revue_etudes_internationales/prix_paulpainchaud/ 

Joost van Spanje

Joost van Spanje (Ph.D. 2009) has been awarded the 2010 Dutch Political Science Association Best PhD Dissertation Prize. His dissertation, Pariah Parties, which was defended at the EUI in 2009, was selected from 52 political science dissertations nominated from that year. In his study, Joost investigates under which circumstances other parties systematically boycott a rival party in their party system, and whether or not such a cordon sanitaire strategy affects a targeted party's electoral support. Joost is currently employed as a post doctoral researcher at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam.

The EU Profiler

The award-winning  EU Profiler voting advice application (VAA) for the European Parliament elections of June 2009 was the first Europe-wide tool of its kind.

The project is based at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and directed by Prof. Alexander Trechsel. It was developed under the auspices of EUDO, in a consortium with the company Kieskompas and NCCR Democracy (University of Zurich/Zentrum für Demokratie Aarau)/Politools network.

When the EU Profiler tool was online from 23 April until the elections it attracted over 2.5 million users.

The EUI ranked amongst the best according to the CHE Excellence Ranking 2009

The Department of Political and Social Sciences has distinguished itself for its international character and the optimal results obtained in its research. 

The complete results of the survey  have been published in the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit.

The criteria for the selection by the Center for Higher Education Development are the high numbers of publications and citations, "highly cited books" as research indicators, student mobility, teaching staff mobility, and the number of projects in the Marie Curie research promotion programme of the EU.

CHE ExcellenceRanking defines "stars" rather than ranking positions.  It is about detailed analysis rather than general ranking. The results are deliberately not summed to give a total number of points.

The reason is that there is simply no "best" higher education institution, either for a single discipline or all disciplines. The ranking is intended for all students/researchers planning a master or doctoral degree and looking for an institution for their research.

For more information visit CHE ranking 

Tiago Fernandes

Tiago Fernandes (Ph.D. 2009) was awarded a research and teaching Fellowship (2009-2011) at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, USA.

Fernandes was also awarded the Gulbenkian Foundation Best Article Award for the best article published by young Portuguese social scientists in the social sciences (except economics) in 2007-2009. See «Authoritarian Regimes and Pro-Democracy Semi-oppositions. The End of the Portuguese Dictatorship (1968-1974) in Comparative Perspective», Democratization, 14 (4) 2007.

Frank Foley

Dr. Foley (Ph.D. 2008) was awarded the Zukerman Postdoctoral Fellowship (2008/09) at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Co-operation (CISAC), where he is working on a comparative analysis of British, French and American counterterrorism.

http://cisac.stanford.edu/people/frankfoley/   

Igor Guardiancich

Igor Guardiancich (Ph.D. 2009) has received the 2008/09 Junior Scholar Award by the Italian Review of Public Policy (Premio giovani studiosi 2008/09, Rivista Italiana di Politiche Pubbliche) for a comparative paper on pension reforms in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe.

Silja Häusermann

Silja Häusermann’s Ph.D. thesis “Modernization in Hard Times: Post-Industrial Pension Politics in France, Germany and Switzerland”, defended in Zurich, was awarded the Jean Blondel Prize for the best Ph.D. of 2008 by the European Consortium of Political Research, and the Ernst B. Haas Prize of 2008 for the best dissertation in European Politics by the American Political Science Association. Silja is currently an SPS Max Weber Fellow.

http://www.mwpweb.eu/SiljaHaeusermann/ 

Adrienne Héritier

Adrienne Héritier was elected Chair of the European Union Studies Association (EUSA) at the Marina del Rey Conference for the period 2009-2011.

John Loughlin

John Loughlin (SPS 1982), Professor of European Politics at Cardiff University since 1985, has received an Honorary Doctorate from the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Umea, Sweden in October 2009.

The Faculty has conferred conferring this honour "in recognition of his great contribution to research in the fields of European politics and regional and local governance".

Philippe C. Schmitter

Prof. Schmitter, Emeritus Professor at EUI, won the Johan Skytte Prize in political science 2009 for his path-breaking work on the role of corporatism in modern democracies, and for his stimulating and innovative analysis of democratization.

http://skytteprize.statsvet.uu.se/ 

He also received the Mattei Dogan Prize awarded by the International Political Science Association to a scholar of high international reputation in recognition of their contribution to political science. This is awarded every three years at the World Congresses of the International Political Science Association (IPSA).

Dorota Szelewa

Dorota Szelewa (Ph.D. 2009) received a two-year fellowship to the Post-doc Programme of the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences at the University of Bremen and Jacobs University.

Alex Wilson

Alex Wilson (Ph.D. 2009) has been awarded the Journal of Regional and Federal Studies Graduate Prize for the best conference paper produced in this field in 2008. The paper compares multi-level negotiations to reform regional statutes of autonomy in Spain, and is co-authored with Andreu Orte, a graduate student at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.