Andres Reiljan, Diego Garzia, Frederico Ferreira Da Silva, and Alexander H. Trechsel are this year's winners of the GESIS Klingemann Prize for the Best CSES Scholarship with their work “Patterns of Affective Polarization toward Parties and Leaders across the Democratic World” published in American Political Science Review.
The GESIS Klingemann Prize for the Best CSES Scholarship is awarded annually to the best academic achievement (paper, article, book, dissertation) of the previous calendar year. The prize is named after Prof. Dr. Hans-Dieter Klingemann, an internationally renowned political scientist and co-founder of the CSES project and is sponsored by GESIS. The prize has been awarded annually since 2011.
The announcement was made at a special CSES-themed reception at the American Political Science Association Conference (APSA) in Philadelphia in September 2024. The award selection committee concluded that “Examining mass-level affect toward parties and their leaders, the Reiljan et al. paper brings together, both in its theoretical discussion and empirical research design, two lines of research that have so far developed separately: polarization and personalization. Another important contribution of this work is its broad geographical scope: while recent research on affective polarization has turned from the US-exclusive focus to a more comparative perspective, it is still often focused on Western democracies. In contrast, the study includes a diverse set of countries, ranging from Taiwan to Estonia. It is a comparative paper, showing Leader Affective Polarization and Party Affective Polarization among countries worldwide, helping us understand the relationship between presidential and parliamentary regimes. The authors make excellent use of CSES data, combining this data with additional context information. They draw several interesting findings, first and foremost, the persistence of the importance of party evaluations and the quality of regime output to avoid charismatic, polarizing leaders who claim to overthrow the existing political system. The connections drawn here between levels of affective polarization toward parties and leaders and institutional features such as party system fragmentation elegantly contribute to theoretical debates on polarization beyond its psychological underpinnings."
This year’s selection committee comprised Noam Gidron (Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel), Rosario Queirolo (Universidad Católica del Uruguay (Chair)), and Jan-Lucas Schanze (GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany). The winners will formally receive recognition of their award at a Conference next year.