The Quality of Government (QoG) Institute´s Best Paper Award is an annual prize awarded to a paper on a Quality of Government related topic, demonstrating outstanding research based on its theoretical and empirical contributions.
2023 year´s Quality of Government Best Paper Award goes to Paweł Charasz, for his paper: “Burghers into Peasants: Political Economy of City Status in Congress Poland.”
Motivation by the award committee
The paper offers an empirically rich and rigorous exploration of questions central to political science, such as the conditions under which democracy may promote or undermine long-term development. Particularly, the author offers a nuanced and compelling argument for how inequality and divergent interests voiced and aggregated under democratic institutions might hinder economic development by impeding the development of the rule of law, public goods provision, and economic competition. The theoretical argument and implications of the findings are both important and thought-provoking.
The paper examines the effects an 1869 reform in Poland that dechartered selected cities, resulting in the introduction of elections in some local settings but not others. As the selection of cities to be dechartered was not strongly associated with potentially relevant local conditions, the reform provides the opportunity to examine the implications of this theoretically relevant point of institutional divergence. The author then leverages numerous innovative indicators to examine the implications of the institutional arrangements, and to account for confounding explanations. The data collection is impressive, and the paper is transparent about the construction, strengths and limitations of each indicator and analysis employed. In sum, the paper makes important contributions to the study of democratization, state capacity and quality of government.
The Committee Members:
Jana Schwenk (Post doc)
Marcia Grimes (Professor)
Rasmus Broms (Associate Professor)
Stephen Dawson (Post doc)
