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.
Citation from the Award Committee:
Niloufer Siddiqui’s Under the Gun: Political Parties and Violence in Pakistan is an empirically impressive, theoretically novel contribution to the study of democracy and political violence. The book seeks to answer the questions: why do democratic actors, especially political parties, employ or aid in violence, and how do their strategies of violence impede state building and effective democratization?
Siddiqui argues that states are sometimes unable to consolidate a democratically-controlled monopoly on violence because parties have political incentives to inhibit the development of that coercive capacity by including violent actors in the party organization, outsourcing violence to other actors, or rallying with violent actors. Using a rich array of methods — qualitative, quantitative, survey, and experimental — Siddiqui’s “meso-level” analysis focuses on the organizational capacity and incentives of political parties as the key actors in generating both democracy and political violence. The book carefully traces the development of political parties’ strategies of violence in Pakistan, and how democratic politics both shape and are shaped by these strategies. It provides an important and novel insight: that political parties are both essential to democracy, and simultaneously often an obstacle to its consolidation.
Under the Gun provides a novel, theoretically rich, and empirically adept understanding of the complex and important relationship between political parties, violence, and democracy. Siddiqui’s findings make a significant contribution to scholarly understanding of the quality and sustainment of democracy worldwide. Her insights into the complex and challenging relationship between democracy and security also provide important foundational knowledge for policymakers working in a broad swathe of countries around the world where political and electoral violence affect the quality of democracy today.
Niloufer Siddiqui is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany-State University of New York (SUNY). She is also a Nonresident Fellow at the Stimson Center and a Fellow at the Mahbub ul Haq Centre at LUMS. Her research has appeared in American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Party Politics, International Studies Quarterly, and Journal of Experimental Political Science, among others. She also has a co-edited volume on political parties in Pakistan (Georgetown University Press).
Dr. Siddiqui previously worked at the International Crisis Group and the International Organization for Migration in Islamabad and the American Civil Liberties Union in New York. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Yale University, an M.A. in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a B.A. in English from Haverford College.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Sheena Chestnut Greitens (Chair) of the University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Michael J. Coppedge of the University of Notre Dame, and Dr. Robin Harding of the University of Oxford.