The Heinz I. Eulau Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best article published in the APSA journal, Perspectives on Politics.
Katherine Levine Einstein is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston University and a Faculty Fellow at the Initiative on Cities. She studies local politics, racial and ethnic politics, and American public policy. She is the author of Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Do Facts Matter? Information and Misinformation in Democratic Politics (University of Oklahoma Press, 2015). Her work has also appeared in multiple peer-reviewed journals, including the American Journal of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, and the Urban Affairs Review. She serves on the editorial board of the Urban Affairs Review. She received her Ph.D. in Government and Social Policy from Harvard University in 2012.
David M. Glick is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston University, a Faculty Fellow at the Initiative on Cities, and the Faculty Director of the MetroBridge program. His research interests include American political institutions, law and courts, and local politics and policy. His book, Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis was published in 2019 by Cambridge University Press. His work has also appeared in peer reviewed journals including the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and Perspectives on Politics. He received his Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University in 2010.
Maxwell Palmer is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston University and a Faculty Fellow at the Initiative on Cities. His research interests include American political institutions, voting rights, and local politics, with a focus on how institutional arrangements and rules impact representation and policy outcomes. His book, Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis was published in 2019 by Cambridge University Press, and his work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, and Perspectives on Politics. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University in 2014.
Citation from the Award Committee:
Einstein et al. address an existing debate about how institutions, by facilitating community participation, can mitigate political inequalities in “Who Participates in Local Government? Evidence from Meeting Minutes.” They explore new aspects of this question by compiling a unique dataset which registers thousands of instances of citizens speaking at planning and zoning board meetings concerning housing development and match these individuals to voter files. On this basis, they show that participation is unrepresentative, and that those who self-select into engaging in these debates are more prone to oppose hew housing construction. Einstein et al. conclude that these participatory inequalities may contribute to rising housing costs, and that this has generally been overlooked by those who see this kind of community participation as buffer against political inequality. The selection committee found this a very impressive article, which codes new data, interrogates it carefully, and arrives at interesting findings, with important real-world implications. It clearly presents a huge amount of work, and it has solicited a lot of interest already, whether measured by downloads, altmetrics or citations. This is the kind of work Perspectives on Politics was created to showcase: strong on an important question, which advances knowledge in a way of interest to specialists but written in a way that is transparent and broadly accessible.
APSA thanks Cambridge University Press for its support of the award and the committee members for their service: Vera Eva Troeger (chair), University of Hamburg; Kathleen Bawn, University of California, Los Angeles; and Jorgen Moller, Aarhus University.
