The Gabriel A. Almond Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best doctoral dissertation in the field of comparative politics.
Citation from the Award Committee:
After reviewing a large number of excellent dissertations, the committee has unanimously selected for the Gabriel A. Almond Award Joséphine Lechartre’s exceptional work, “Genocide and Cultural Change: Civilian Survival Strategies and the Reinvention of Political Culture During Guatemala’s Mayan Genocide.”
This dissertation provides an answer to the question of how mass political violence affects post-conflict political engagement. Dr. Lechartre develops a novel theory that explains how civilians’ different survival strategies during genocide reshape communities’ political cultures, resulting in either sustained political engagement or demobilization post-conflict. Different survival strategies—exit, voice, and loyalty—place civilians in new cultural environments. These strategies and environments result in diverse post-conflict political cultures.
Dr. Lechartre also shifts our understanding of political culture, from “orientations towards the political system” (Almond and Verba 1965) to “cultural representations that individuals activate to make the political system intelligible”. Her conceptualization improves upon past approaches by allowing for political subcultures within a country and lending itself to clear measures. She uses her definition of political culture to show that it can change rapidly, rather than always being a “slow-moving variable”.
Dr. Lechartre supports her argument with methodological rigor and impressive original data. She uses a wide range of identification techniques to demonstrate the effect of survival strategies on political culture. These range from detailed historical analyses of each survival strategy— exit to refugee camps in Mexico, voice by joining the guerrilla movement in the jungle, or loyalty by remaining in villages under Guatemalan military control—to an examination of an as-if random-assignment of a subset of survivors to two refugee camps with different cultures. Investigating variation in experiences and their impact both across survival strategies and within one (the exit option) is a powerful approach. Dr. Lechartre’s data collection methods included interviews with genocide survivors, representatives of nongovernmental and religious organizations, and former combatants; community surveys; participant observation; and research in both Guatemalan and Mexican archives. Equally important as the scope and power of her research methods are her well-articulated awareness and understanding of the ethical risks of research in indigenous communities that survived genocide and, accordingly, the precautions she took.
Dr. Lechartre’s dissertation contributes to our understanding of many key topics in comparative politics: political culture; political repression, trauma, and resilience; political legacies of mass violence, and democracy after atrocity. Her dissertation is well-deserving of the Almond Award.
Joséphine Lechartre is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Interamerican Policy and Research at Tulane University. She earned her PhD in Political Science and Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame in May 2024, and a BA in Latin American Studies and an MA in International Security from Sciences Po Paris, France.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Kelly McMann (Chair) of Case Western Reserve University, Dr. Mareike Kleine of the London School of Economics, and Dr. Kyle Marquardt of the University of Bergen