01 May 2020
Alice Cavalieri is the winner of the inaugural Bryan D. Jones Prize! The prize is awarded for the best paper presented by a junior scholar at the previous CAP-conference (Budapest, 2019). Alice is from the University of Siena, and her paper is entitled, “The Shape of the Budget: European Countries’ Public Expenditure in the last twenty years”.
From the award's namesake, Dr. Bryan Jones:
“Alice Cavalieri’s paper, The Shape of the Budget, provides the most complete look at budget outputs from the vantage point of policy process theory, and in particular punctuated equilibrium, that we have to date. She studies budgetary changes during the period from 1996 to 2017 for thirty European countries, finding the now-classic leptokurtic budgetary pattern for all countries and budget categories aggregated. The pattern is almost symmetrical, whereas most other distributions have been somewhat right skewed, perhaps a result of the severe austerity in Europe after the Great Recession. Then Cavalieri develops models based on economic, institutional and political factors across countries. She finds a strong association between economic growth, lagged three fiscal years, and reduced punctuations. Legal constraints on budgets lower budgetary punctuations, and as does partisan polarization. Parliamentary fragmentation probably increases punctuations. The most exciting part of the paper is the number of new theses that this new dataset will allow Cavalieri and other policy scholars to explore. The inclusion of economic, structural, and political variables in the dataset will allow deep exploration of just how particular variables within specific countries operate, among other things. The Shape of the Budget is already a major contribution to our understanding of budgetary politics, and promises many more insights as Cavalieri’s research program goes forward.”
The award committee read a large number of intriguing papers and would also like to mention three papers that were close competitors to the winning one:
Nick Or: How Economic “Globalization Shapes Executive Speeches”
Klaus Jonathan Klüser: “Beyond Ministerial Portfolios”
Chris Butler: ”Are UK governments more responsive on the issues that matter more to their own supporters?”
Many thanks to the award committee for all their hard work. Thank you, Miklós Sebók, Rens Vliegenhart, and Christoffer Green-Pedersen!