David Muchlinski and Sarah Birch Receive Frank Cass Award for Best Article

Posted April 29, 2019

David Muchlinski, assistant professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology's Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, and Sarah Birch, professor of Political Science at King's College London, were recently awarded the 2018 Frank Cass Award for Best Article for their paper “Electoral Violence Prevention: What Works?”.

Democratization, the journal which published their paper, confers Frank Cass Prizes annually to authors whose articles “most enhance our knowledge and understanding of democratization,” according to the publication’s editorial and international advisory boards. The journal's editorial board is comprised of top scholars in the field of comparative democratization studies.

In their article, Muchlinski and Birch evaluate the success of different electoral violence prevention (EVP) strategies in reforming electoral institutions and enabling them to maintain peace during the electoral period. This article assesses the effectiveness of two common types of international EVP activity: capacity-building strategies and attitude-transforming strategies.

The article finds evidence that capacity-building strategies reduce violence by non-state actors, whereas attitude-transforming strategies are associated with a reduction in violence by state actors and their allies.

In addition to Democratization, Muchlinski's research has been published in multiple academic journals including Political Analysis, Terrorism and Political Violence, and Politics and Religion. Prior to joining the faculty at the Nunn School, he was a postdoctoral research associate with the Project on Explaining and Mitigating Electoral Violence at the University of Glasgow and King's College London, and with the Atrocity Forecasting Project the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs is a unit of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.