We are delighted to announce the winner of this year’s John Peterson Prize for the best article published in 2025 in the PSA’s British Journal of Politics and International Relations.
The winning article is “Inside the ‘secret garden’: Candidate selection at the 2019 UK general election” by Chris Butler, Marta Miori, and Rob Ford.
The panel of judges were very impressed with all of the shortlisted articles, but had particular praise for the winning entry:
“This is a very strong article that adds substantially to understanding of an important part of the democratic process. Based on original data generated by the authors and subject to appropriate analytic techniques, the article’s most important contribution is the construction of a new cross-party dataset that includes not only successful candidates but also the other shortlisted contenders in winnable constituencies. That is substantively valuable not merely an exercise in data collection: it permits the authors to distinguish between the alternatives made available to party selectorates and the choices those selectorates make among them. The resulting findings are interesting and consequential. The wide range of variables the authors were able to measure provides an impressive depth of insight. As a result of their assiduous work they were able to look at the role of factionalism in candidate selection hitherto largely neglected in the field.”
The runners up (unranked) for this prize were:
- Luiza Cerioli ‘Neoclassical Realism, Global International Relations, and the unheard echoes of Realist practices from the South’
- Alexandra Homolar and Juan Alberto Ruiz Casado, ‘Imaginaries of trauma and victimhood: The role of the ‘China threat’ in Trump’s populism of the privileged’
- Kei Koga ‘Tactical hedging as coalition-building signal: The evolution of Quad and AUKUS in the Indo-Pacific’
- Dillon Wamsley, ‘Revisiting the theoretical foundations of depoliticisation: A Gramscian state theory approach for an era of crisis’
The John Peterson Prize was judged independently by three members of our BJPIR International Editorial Advisory Board; Prof. Roger Awan-Scully (Hong Kong Baptist University) Prof. Rosie Campbell (Kings College London) and Prof. Mark A. Pollack (Temple University).
