Awardee | Katerina Linos (Ph.D. '07)
Katherina Linos has been honored with three awards for her first book, The Democratic Foundations of Policy Diffusion: How Health, Family and Employment Laws Spread Across Countries (Oxford University Press, 2013).
- The 2014 Giovanni Sartori Book Award from the American Political Science Association, which recognizes excellence in the development or application of qualitative methods.
- The 2014 Chadwick Alger Book Prize for the best work published in 2013 in the area of multilateralism and global governance. The Prize is awarded annually by the International Organization Section of the International Studies Association.
- The 2014 Peter Katzenstein Book Prize. The Katzenstein Prize is awarded annually to "an outstanding first book in International Relations, Comparative Politics, or Political Economy." The prize was established on the occasion of Peter Katzenstein’s 40th Year at Cornell University.
Previously the book had been selected among the Best Books of 2013 on Western Europe by Foreign Affairs.
Katherina Linos received her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2006 and her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard in 2007. She is now a Professor of Law at U.C. Berkeley School of Law.
From the Peter Katzenstein Book Prize citation
"This impressive book draws on a sophisticated research design, wide-ranging theorizing, and rigorous and creative empirical methods to offer the novel and powerful argument that international models matter in policy choice. Linos brings together her interests in both political science and international law to study the mechanisms by which democracies adopt health care, family and labor law models from abroad.
"Her motivating puzzle is the question of why rich democracies, which have strong domestic policy-building capacities, would need to borrow models from abroad. She argues that even they find “international benchmarking” useful...
"Challenging technocratic arguments about policy diffusion, Linos argues that ordinary voters’ uncertainties and politicians’ reelection concerns are critical to policy diffusion; international models can help politicians rally voter support behind proposed reforms. The extensive and innovative research highlights the interactions between the domestic and international realms and applies rigorous social science methods to tell us something new and important about international law."
Learn more about this book
The Democratic Foundations of Policy Diffusion
How Health, Family, and Employment Laws Spread Across Countries
Oxford University Press, 2013.
By Katerina Linos