Two UBC Political Science alumni were recently honoured with an American Political Science Association’s European Politics and Society section award!
Klaudia Wegschaider (BA’15) received the Ernst B. Haas Best Dissertation Award, while Alex Mierke-Zatwarnicki (BA’15) was given an honourable mention for the same award. Both Klaudia and Alex are graduates of the UBC Political Science Honours program.
Klaudia Wegschaider (BA'15)
Klaudia completed her PhD dissertation at the University of Oxford in 2023. Titled “Democratisation After Democratisation: The Politics of Contemporary Enfranchisement,” her dissertation studied party strategies in relation to the extension of immigrant, emigrant, and youth voting rights. Her work is based on three in-depth case studies drawing on archival fieldwork in Austria, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
In addition to the APSA European Politics and Society section award, Klaudia’s dissertation also received an honourable mention for the Best Dissertation Award by the APSA Migration and Citizenship section.
Klaudia will be joining Yale University’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies as the Democratic Innovations Postdoctoral Associate in September 2024.
Klaudia’s work focuses on the causes and consequences of electoral reforms, especially enfranchisement. As a primarily qualitative researcher, she combines case studies with quantitative and experimental methods.
Alex Mierke-Zatwarnicki (BA'15)
Alex is currently a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. She holds a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University.
In her dissertation, “Identity Politics, Old and New: Party-building in the Long Twentieth Century,” Alex explores the diverse ways that political outsiders construct boundaries of group membership and narratives of social conflict as they carve out a foothold in democratic politics. Her research employs a combination of qualitative case studies and quantitative text analysis, drawing comparisons across multiple waves of party entry.
In September, Alex will join the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University as a postdoctoral fellow.
Alex’s work focuses on political parties and group identity in Western Europe. A core theme of her research is understanding how different patterns of political and social organization combine to shape the ‘arena’ of electoral politics and the opportunity space for new competitors.
Congratulations to Klaudia and Alex!
