The GESIS Klingemann Prize for the Best Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) Scholarship is awarded every year for the best CSES scholarship, including paper, book, dissertation, or other scholarly work, broadly defined. The prize is named in honour of Professor Hans-Dieter Klingemann, an internationally renowned political scientist and major contributor to comparative research, as well as the co-founder of the CSES project.
This year's first prize was awarded to SPS alumnus Vicente Valentim for a paper published in Comparative Political Studies, entitled Parliamentary Representation and the Normalization of Radical Right Support. The paper is part of his PhD thesis, Social norms and stigmatized political behavior, defended at the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences in 2021. Valentim's thesis was also awarded the Linz Rokkan Prize in 2022 by the SPS Department as well as the SPS Thesis of the Month award.
In his winning paper, Valentim opened a new agenda in the study of far-right politics. Rather than looking at the roots of their success, he investigated the consequences of their success by showing that people are more likely to admit voting for them after they have — marginally — entered the national parliament. This work has already paved the way for numerous studies looking at how far-right success opened the Pandora's box for far-right policies, beliefs and stances to be publicly articulated. Building on this idea, his current work provides new avenues in the study of normative expectations and how these might change within the domain of politics in advanced democracies.
Given how popular this data is, the competition for this prize is often very high, making the award a great achievement.
Vicente Valentim is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford.