Katherine Cramer, MCRC Senior Fellow, and Benjamin Toff, former SMAD member, received the Heinz Eulau Award for the best article published in Perspectives on Politics in 2017 for “The Fact of Experience: Rethinking Political Knowledge and Civic Competence” (Perspectives on Politics 15(3): 754-770). The piece asserts that the emphasis on facts is misplaced in the study of political knowledge. Drawing upon three different projects involving observation of political talk and elite interviews, they observe that citizens and elites process political information through the lens of their personal experience. They propose an Expanded Model of Civic Competence that presents an alternative interpretation for what it means to be an informed citizen in a democracy. In this model, the competence of listening to and understanding the different lived experiences of others cannot be considered separately from levels of factual knowledge.
Benjamin Toff, who is now an Assistant Professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities (since 2017) also received the 2018 E. E. Schattschneider Award for best dissertation in the field of American government and the 2017 Thomas E. Patterson Award for best dissertation, Political Communication section, both from the American Political Science Association . His project, “The Blind Scorekeepers: Journalism, Polling, and the Battle to Define Public Opinion in American Politics,’ was advised by Katherine Cramer (chair), Barry Burden, Young Mie Kim, Dhavan Shah, Michael W. Wagner, and Charles Franklin.