Best PhD

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Best PhD Thesis

A prize will be awarded annually for the PhD thesis that makes the most substantial and original contribution to knowledge in the area of European Studies.

2008 Competition | 2007 Winner | 2006 Winner | 2005 Winner

Best PhD 2008

A prize of £100 will be awarded for the PhD thesis that makes the most substantial and original contribution to knowledge in the area of European Studies. To be eligible for the award, the PhD thesis must be written in English and have been examined in the previous calendar year (i.e. up to 31 December 2007).

Nominations must be made by the PhD supervisor in conjunction with the external examiner and must include:

two printed copies of the thesis (i.e. we want hardcopies, NOT electronic or digital copies, and we do not expect expensive binding)
two copies of the completed nomination form

The prize-winner will be invited to submit the thesis, suitably revised, for possible publication in the Routledge-UACES Contemporary European Studies series.

The deadline for nominations is 31 March 2008. All nominations should be sent to the UACES office.

Only Individual members or Student members of UACES will be eligible for the prize.

Best PhD 2007

The prize for the best thesis 2007 has been awarded to Thomas Larue, for his doctoral dissertation entitled Agents in Brussels: Delegations and Democracy in the European Union, submitted at Umeå University and under the supervision of Professor Torbjörn Bergman. The thesis draws on an empirical study of COREPER, particularly the Permanent Representations to the EU of both Sweden and France, set against the tensions between democracy and bureaucracy, delegation and control. The judges commended both its empirical richness and its ‘superbly mature critique’ of no less than 8 literatures, which was used to generate a powerful analytical framework. The judges also praised the thesis for its methodological richness and reflexivity, and were impressed by its conclusions regarding both future academic research and reform to the praxis of delegation in COREPER.

Thomas Larue receiving his prize from John Kerr

Best PhD 2006

The judges decided to award the 2006 UACES Prize for the thesis making the most substantial contribution to European Studies jointly to Dr Sara Binzer Hobolt and Dr Maria Strömvik.

Sara Binzer Hobolt’s thesis, presented to the University of Cambridge in 2005 is entitled Europe in Question: The Role of Political Information in Referendums on European Integration under the supervision of Dr Pieter van Houten. The judges felt that this is an exceptional political science thesis which presents and applies a path-breaking theory of political information in connection with referendums on European integration. The theory was not confined to the European Union in its implications but to referendums in general. The conclusions were clear and the thesis makes a major contribution to European studies and comparative politics.

Maria Strömvik’s thesis, presented to the University of Lund in 2005 is entitled To Act as a Union: Explaining the development of the EU’s collective foreign policy under the supervision of Professor Magnus Jerneck. The judges concluded that this thesis offered a clear research question: how to explain the positive evolution of EPC/CFSP. It puts forward three hypotheses: institutional changes that generate a more cohesive EU foreign policy; balancing outside threat; balancing the global influence of the US. Strömvik opts for the last explanation, with corollary that the reinforcing that goes on at a time of crisis with the US is often in an unrelated area of foreign policy-making. However, the broad hypotheses, which make the thesis of wide interest, are combined with a rigorous methodology. The thesis’ overall contribution to knowledge is high because it has developed a powerful argument and it has shed considerable light on the dynamics of European foreign policy in an original manner.

Best PhD 2005

The 2005 prize winner was Dr Dermot Hodson (European Institute, London School of Economics & Political Science) for his thesis 'Economic Governance and the Dual Outcome in Euro Area Fiscal Policy 1999-2002', under the supervision of Dr Robert Hancké and Dr Waltraud Schelkle. Dermot Hodson was awarded his prize at the UACES Annual Conference Dinner, in Zagreb, September 2005, by UACES Honorary President, John Kerr (Lord Kerr of Kinlochard).

The thesis looks at why the euro-area outcomes were different between two groups of countries – those observing the stability and growth pact strictures, and those failing to do so. What marks this work out in general, is that it tackles a subject – EMU – not only as a technical exercise in applied macroeconomics, and does so extremely ably, whilst at the same time offering original research in a novel regime of economic governance. That is, in seeking to explain events, Hodson is forced to engage in sophisticated economic analysis, and to critique the governance arrangements of the EMU fiscal policy system. In that latter aspect his enforced starting point is one in which there is very little in the way of existing analytical literature. The governance architecture of the fiscal policy side of EMU is novel and complex, in that it combines elements of institutionalised ‘soft law’ that co-exist with more conventional arrangements for international monetary diplomacy. Hodson picks apart this complexity very cleverly, and brings to bear upon it interesting analytical tools (including institutionalism) that help render it tractable in an intellectual sense.

The concluding sections of the thesis successfully bring together the various elements of the thesis and lead Hodson to generate some policy options for policy-makers if they are to make this fiscal dimension to EMU work more effectively.

Dermot Hodson and John Kerr