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:
The Robert A. Dahl Award honors an untenured scholar whose work makes an outstanding contribution to the study of democracy and broadens our understanding of how democracies function. This year, the committee is delighted to present the award to Vicente Valentim for his book, The Normalization of the Radical Right: A Norms Theory of Political Supply and Demand..
In this book, Valentim addresses a pressing question for contemporary democracies: why and how does the radical right become accepted in mainstream politics? Valentim’s central argument is that the recent rise in radical right behavior is not driven by a change in underlying preferences, but by a transformation in social norms that reduces the perceived costs of expressing pre-existing radical right views. Drawing on diverse evidence — including case studies, survey experiments, and elite analyses — Valentim demonstrates how shifts in norms enable private attitudes to manifest publicly, reshaping political behavior at both the citizen and elite levels. This work raises important questions about the emergence of new parties and highlights the crucial role that norm enforcement plays in either stemming or amplifying the spread of non-democratic attitudes.
While this book is the central focus of the award, Valentim’s broader contributions to the study of democracy are equally noteworthy. Since earning his PhD in 2021, he has published more than ten articles that explore elite signaling, public tolerance of authoritarianism, and the dynamics of political norms, reflecting sustained and rigorous engagement with the foundations of democratic life. The Dahl Award celebrates early-career scholars whose research transforms our understanding of democracy, and Vicente Valentim exemplifies this standard. APSA and the award committee congratulate Dr. Valentim for his timely and influential scholarship and anticipate his continued leadership in the field.
Vicente Valentim is an Assistant Professor of political science at IE University (Madrid). He earned his PhD from the European University Institute in 2021. Before joining IE, he was a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, where he remains affiliated as an associate member. Vicente’s work seeks to understand how democracies put in place norms against some political behaviors, how those norms are enforced, and how they erode. His first book, The Normalization of the Radical Right: A Norms Theory of Political Supply and Demand, was published in 2024 by Oxford University Press, as part of the Oxford Studies in Democratization Series. His articles have been published in The Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and British Journal of Political Science, among other journals. Vicente is the recipient of the 2025 CES Moyer Young Scholar Award, of the 2024 Joseph L. Bernd Award for best article in the Journal of Politics, of the 2022 ECPR Blondel Prize for best thesis in politics and international relations, and of the APSA Political Psychology Section’s Distinguished Junior Scholar Award, among other awards. More information about him and his work can be found at www.vicentevalentim.com.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Rachel Riedl (Chair) of Cornell University, Dr. Andy Harris of New York University Abu Dhabi, and Dr. Noam Lupu of Vanderbilt University