The William Anderson Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best dissertation in the general field of federalism or intergovernmental relations, state, and local politics.
Citation from the Award Committee:
The winner of the 2026 William Anderson Award is Jonathan Colner, for his dissertation entitled “Legislative Attention and Electoral Institutions in Municipal Government.” In this dissertation, Colner uses cutting-edge methodological approaches to test long-standing assumptions about the impact of multiple electoral reforms across American localities.
For example, in one essay, Colner challenges a long-standing belief since the Progressive Era: that a shift from at-large to district-based elections leads representatives to focus more narrowly on neighborhood concerns. Drawing on an original database of city council agendas from 72 California cities assembled through hand-coding and large language model text analysis, Colner finds the opposite: district-elected council members devote less attention to parochial issues. He argues that the key mechanism is candidate entry: district elections lower barriers to entry for activists motivated by broader policy concerns. Here, Colner identifies an important unintended consequence of voting-rights reforms aimed at improving representation at the neighborhood level.
In a separate part of the dissertation, Colner explores the impact of Ranked Choice Voting reforms on candidate recruitment and election. Comparing cities that switched to RCV against similar cities that did not, Colner shows that adopting RCV did not raise the share of women or minority candidates in city council or mayoral races—not right after the switch, and not years later. Earlier studies claiming a diversity boost had just looked at single cities before and after; this new work shows that earlier picture falling apart, upon exploring the right comparison set.
Such careful, systematic assessments of electoral institutions and their effects, even in the face of long-held assumptions or current popular reform proposals, show the value of Jonathan Colner’s scientific approach to important questions of municipal governance. This is a scholarly approach and set of findings worthy of the William Anderson Award.
Jonathan Colner is an assistant professor of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University. His research interests include local political institutions, causal inference, and machine learning methods for collecting and processing local administrative data. His work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis, and PS: Political Science and Politics. Previously, Jonathan was a faculty fellow at NYU’s Center for Data Science. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from University of California, Davis, in 2024.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Craig Volden (Chair) of the University of Virginia, Jason Windett of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Clayton Nall of the University of California, Santa Barbara