The Robert A. Dahl Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor an untenured scholar who has produced scholarship of the highest quality on the subject of democracy.
Aram Hur is the incoming Kim Koo Chair in Korean Studies and Assistant Professor of Political Science at The Fletcher School at Tufts University. She is a scholar of nationalism and democracy with a focus on issues of identity change, integration, and democratic support in East Asia. She is the author of Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia (Cornell University Press, 2022), and her research appears in journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, and Comparative Political Studies.
Dr. Hur was previously on faculty at the University of Missouri, where she served as Co-Director of the MU Institute for Korean Studies and received the 2023 Gold Chalk Award for teaching and advising. She holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University, an M.P.P. from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a B.A. with honors from Stanford University.
Citation from the Award Committee:
Aram Hur’s Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia is an impressive, theoretically rich, and empirically strong contribution to the field of comparative politics. The book seeks to answer the question: Why do some citizens feel it is their responsibility to vote, to pay taxes, or to do military service while others do not? Studying this question in East Asia, in particular a comparison between South Korea and Taiwan, Hur makes the argument that civic duty is grounded in a sense of obligation to the community, implying civic duty is rooted in nationalism. In making this argument, Hur asserts that nationalism is not inherently opposed to democracy. Instead, the impact of nationalism on democracy depends on the historical connection between a nation and its democratic governance. If national narratives depict this connection as a mutual commitment, nationalism can enhance democracies by inspiring a sense of civic responsibility among the populace. The empirical analyses that support this argument rely on an impressively broad range of methods and approaches, including analyses of personal narratives of young citizens, large N-survey analyses, and original survey experiments. Hur’s Narratives of Civic Duty makes two important contributions to comparative politics literature. First, Hur draws attention to the importance of civic duty for democratic governance – in this way giving a central place to an attitude that we still know little about. Second, examining non-Western countries where democracy has historically been weak, she shows that nationalism can have favorable effects on democracy – challenging conventional wisdom.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Ruth Dassonneville (chair) of the University of Montreal, Dr. Anna M. Grzymala-Busse of Stanford University, and Dr. Cynthia McClintock of George Washington University.
congratulations Dr Hur for winning this award. she is a true researcher and her thought are research on nationalism and democracy are really great addition to the topic.