The Reinhard Bendix Student Paper Award is for the best student paper. Submissions are solicited for papers written by students enrolled in graduate programs at the time the paper was written. Students can self-nominate their finest work or can be nominated by their mentors.
2025
co-winner
Peter Kent-Stoll, UMass Amherst, “Dispossessory citizenship: The settler colonial state and the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ relocation program, 1952–1972.” Social Problems 71, no. 4 (2024): 1014-1031.
co-winner
Emily H. Ruppel, UC Berkeley, “How Work Becomes Invisible: The Erosion of the Wage Floor for Workers with Disabilities.” American Sociological Review 89, no. 5 (2024): 907-936.
Honorable Mention:
Muhammad Amasha, Yale University, “Theorizing Dilemmas through Intellectuals’ Politics”
2024
Matthew Brooke, Harvard University, “How Democracy’s Resisters Forge Organizational Change: Insights from the Emergence of Christian Right Broadcasting Companies”
Honorable Mention
Jillian LaBranche, University of Minnesota, “Macro-Micro Interaction in Knowledge Construction: Structural and Communicative Memory in Rwanda and Sierra Leone”
2023
Luis Flores (University of Michigan) for “Zoning as a Labor Market Regulation.”
Honorable Mentions
Shilin Jia (University of Chicago) and Benjamin Rohr (University of Mannheim) for “Vacancy Chains as Strategy: Inter-Administration Mobility of Political Elites in Reform China.”
2022
Jen Triplett (U. of Michigan) for “Articulating the Pueblo Cubano: Women’s Politicization and Productivity in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959.” (Published at the American Sociological Review)
Honorable Mention:
Mary Shi (UC-Berkeley) for “’Until Indian title shall be… fairly extinguished:’ The Public Lands, Settler Colonialism, and Early Government Promotion of Infrastructure in the United States.”
2021
Omri Tubi (Northwestern), “Kill me a mosquito and I will build a state: political economy and the socio-technicalities of Jewish colonization in Palestine, 1922–1940” Theory and Society:50, pages 97–124 (2021).
Honorable Mention:
Wen Xie (Chicago), “Generation as Structure: Market Transformation in China’s Socialist Industrial Heartland”
2020
Simeon J. Newman, University of Michigan, “Mass Clientelism: A Mode of Political Intermediation.”
Honorable Mention:
Lantian Li, Northwestern University, “Redefining Innovation for Development: The Political Economy of New Drug Classification in China.”
2019
Luciana de Souza Leao “Optics of the State: The Politics of Making Poverty Visible in Brazil and Mexico” (Ph.D. candidate, Columbia University).
2018
Yueran Zhang “Preempting “No Taxation without Representation”: The Case of Taxing Private Homeownership in China.”
Honorable Mention:
A.K.M. Skarpelis for “Beyond Aryans: Making Germans in the Nazi Empire”
Katrina Quisumbing King for “The Sources and Political Uses of Ambiguity in Statecraft”
2017
Chengpang Lee (Chicago, Sociology) and Myung-Sahm Suh (Chicago, Divinity School), “State-Building and Religion: Explaining the Diverged Path of Religious Change in Taiwan and South Korea, 1950-1980.”
Honorable Mention:
Alexander F. Roehrkasse (Berkeley, Sociology), “The Demise of the Debtors’ Prison: Market Development, State Formation, and the Moral Politics of Credit.”
2016
Mohammad Ali Kadivar. “Mass Mobilization and the Durability of New Democracies”, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Honorable Mention:
Adaner Usmani. “Democracy and the Class Struggle”, New York University.
2015
Robert Braun. “Religious Minorities and Resistance to Genocide: The Collective Rescue of Jews in the Netherlands during the Holocaust.” Political Science, Cornell University. (Forthcoming, American Political Science Review)
2014
co-winner
Eric W. Schoon and A. Joseph West. “From Prophecy to Practice: Mutual Selection Cycles in the Routinization of Charismatic Authority.” University of Arizona.
co-winner
Emily A. Marshall. “Great Expectations? Population Projections and Politics in Twentieth Century France and Great Britain.” Princeton University and University of Michigan.
2013
Yale Berda (Princeton), “The Peculiar Persistence of Colonial Legacies: Why New Nations Reproduce State Practices against which their Founders Struggled.”
Honorable Mention:
Deirdre Bloome and Christopher Muller (Harvard), “Slavery and African-American Marriage in the Postbellum South, 1860-1880.”
2012
co-winner
Carly Knight (Harvard). “A Voice but Not a Vote: The Case of Surrogate Representation and Social Welfare For Legal Noncitizens Since 1996.”
co-winner
Diana Rodriguez-Francoz (Northwestern). “Internal Wars, Taxation, and State Building.”
2011
Joshua Bloom (UCLA). “Insurgent Influence on Truman’s Civil Rights Policy: A Theoretically Informed Event Structure Analysis.”
Honorable Mention:
Josh Pacewicz (University of Chicago). “Old Factions, New Partnerships: How the Changing Integration of Economic and Civil Institutions Produces Avoidance of Partisan Politics in Local Life.”
2010
Anoulak Kittikhoun (CUNY Graduate Center, Political Science), 2009. “Small State, Big Revolution: Geography and the Revolution in Laos.” Theory and Society 38(1).
Honorable Mention:
2009
Ateş Altinordu (Yale), “The Politicization of Religion: Political Catholicism and Political Islam in Comparison.”
Honorable Mention
Wesley Hiers (UCLA), “The Colonial Roots of Racialized Polities.”
2008
Besnik Pula (Michigan), “The Informal Road to State Power: State Building in the Albanian Highlands, 1919-1939.”
2007
Anna Paretskaya (The New School), “Middle Class without Capitalism? Socialist Ideology and Post-Collectivist Discourse in Late Soviet Union”
2006
Amy Kate Bailey (University of Washington), “Fertility and Revolution: When Does Political Change Influence Reproductive Behavior?”
2005
Tammy Smith (Columbia University), “Narrative Networks and the Dynamics of Ethnic Conflict and Conciliation”
Honorable Mention:
Martin Kreidl (University of California-Los Angeles), “Politics and Secondary School Tracking in Socialist Czechoslovakia, 1948-1989” European Sociological Review (2004) 20: 123-139.
2004
Scott Leon Washington (Princeton University), “Principles of Racial Taxonomy.”
Honorable Mention:
Jason W. Moore (Berkeley, Geography), “The Modern World System as Environmental History? Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism.” Theory and Society (June 2003) 32, pp. 307-377.
2003
Ho-fung Hung. 2003. ?Orientalist Knowledge and Social Theories: China and the European Conceptions of East-West Differences from 1600 to 1900.? Sociological Theory. Vol. 21, No. 3. 254-79.