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 2025 William Anderson Award is “The Subnational Roots of Democratic Stability” by Julian Michel (UCLA). In this dissertation, Michel takes on a timely and important question: How can the politics of subnational governments serve to bolster democracy in countries around the world? Michel advances a theory of how subnational governments that are controlled by the opposition party can effectively check a national executive’s efforts to expand power, including by increasing the competitiveness of the opposition party in subsequent national elections. To test this theory, Michel collected a dataset of subnational election outcomes impressive in scope, covering 84 democracies from 1990 to 2021. The quantitative empirical analysis features country-level analysis of these panel data, an extensive set of robustness checks to explore alternative explanations, as well as a regression discontinuity design estimating the effects of the opposition party winning close races for subnational offices in Latin America. Paired with recent important political science research on how subnational governments can potentially weaken democracy, Michel’s dissertation offers a compelling counterpoint and adds considerable nuance, showing that subnational governments offer opposition parties leverage to reduce national executive aggrandizement. This well written, carefully researched dissertation is most deserving of the 2025 Anderson Award.
Julian Michel is an Assistant Professor of Government and International Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. Julian’s research is in Comparative Politics with an emphasis on the role of opposition-led subnational governments in democratic backsliding and state capacity building. His work has appeared in International Organization and received multiple recognitions, including the APSA Wallerstein Award for best article in Political Economy and the MPSA Kellogg/Notre Dame Award for best paper in Comparative Politics. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his MA and BA from Heidelberg University.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Sarah Anzia (Chair) of the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Justin Phillips of Columbia University, Dr. Tracy Fenwick of Australian National University, and Dr. Zoltan Hajnal of the University of California, San Diego