I’ve served as chair of the American Political Science Association Political Communication Section’s Murray Edelman Distinguished Career Award award committee, serving alongside Holli Semetko and Markus Prior. The award is given every two years to recognize a lifetime contribution to the study of Political Communication.
I’m delighted to share that the award this year is going to Professor Ann Crigler from the University of Southern California and Professor Paolo Mancini from Università di Perugia, both of whom I have learned a lot from, and both of whom have demonstrated the value of collaborative work.
Below is the award text.
The award committee for the 2019 Murray Edelman Distinguished Career Award, which recognizes a lifetime contribution to the study of Political Communication and is awarded every other year, consisted of Holli Semetko, Markus Prior, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (chair).
This year, the committee made a unanimous decision to recognize two scholars for the contribution each of them have made through their lifetime of service and their scholarship, individually and with various co-authors.
We would therefore like to congratulate Professor Ann Crigler from the University of Southern California and Professor Paolo Mancini from Università di Perugia, who both will receive a Murray Edelman Distinguished Career Award from the American Political Science Association Political Communication Section this year.
For both Professor Crigler and Professor Mancini, we would like to briefly recognize both some the scholarship they have done as well as how they both model scholarship in a way we can all draw inspiration from.
For Professor Crigler, we would in particular highlight her ground-breaking and wide-ranging work including her 1992 book with W. Russell Neuman and Marion Just “Common Knowledge” on news and the construction of meaning, as well as her 1996 book “Crosstalk” where she with a team of five co-authors examine interactions between citizens, candidates, and the media in a presidential campaign. Among her extensive record of work on political communication, public opinion, and political psychology, these books are just two examples of theoretically ambitious, methodologically innovative, empirically grounded analysis of substantially important questions that has helped the field as a whole advance.
For Professor Mancini, beyond his important role in the development of political communication as a field of study in Italy specifically and Europe more broadly, we want to highlight his pioneering role in developing comparative frameworks for and perspectives on political communication. This has been driven by his own single-authored publications as well as a number of important articles, edited books, and monographs with different collaborators, including both the “Politics, media, and modern democracy” edited with David Swanson in 1996 as well as his collaborations with Daniel C. Hallin on a number of projects including their 2004 book “Comparing Media Systems: Three models of media and politics.”
We want to recognize both Professor Crigler and Professor Mancini for their individual lifetime contribution to the study of political communication through their scholarship. We would also like to recognize how they both model scholarship through their life-long commitment to a combination of individual and co-authored work, and want to underline that the two Murray Edelman Distinguished Career Awards given today demonstrates how one can advance the study of political communication theoretically, methodologically, and substantially in a collaborative fashion, and how important it is that we as a field recognize and reward everyone involved in such collegial work.
rasmuskleisnielsen.net 