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The Wildenmann Prize
In acknowledging Rudolf Wildenmann's lasting contribution to the ECPR, the Executive Committee decided in 1997 to
donate this prize which is annually awarded to a young colleague (within five years of receiving their Ph.D.) for
an outstanding paper presented at the Joint Sessions of workshops.
The jury is made up of two Executive Committee members and the editors of EJPR.
Rudolf Wildenmann
* 15.1.1921 † 14.7.1993
Rudolf Wildenmann will be remembered by his friends and colleagues for many things, not least of those being his
role nationally and internationally in advancing electoral research.
He had, after his return in 1946 from Canada where he had been a POW, studied economics, sociology and political
science at the University of Heidelberg where he both obtained his diploma and his PhD. After some years in
journalism, he in 1959 joined Ferdinand A. Hermens at the University of Cologne who had just returned from the
United States to accept a professorship there. Wildenmann collaborated in Cologne with Erwin K. Scheuch and the
late Gerhard Baumert of the Frankfurt based DIVO institute to design the first major German election study after
the war. The Special Issue No. 9 of the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie
(entitled Zur Soziologie der Wahl) which he edited with Scheuch and Baumert amply speaks to the complexity,
advanced theoretical standing and innovativeness of that study; it has up to now not been surpassed on these
dimensions by later work.
Wildenmann's love affair with the study of elections continued in Mannheim where in 1964 he had accepted a call
to take the newly designed Lehrstuhl für Politische Wissenschaft. In the following years he became a nationally
known figure in West Germany since he had teamed up with the Second German Television Network (ZDF) to analyse
on TV all national and state elections between 1964 and 1972. It is typical for him that he used this TV
connection to create a series of election studies which are a central building block even today in the set
of German election studies distributed by the Cologne Zentralarchiv für Empirische Sozialforschung for secondary
analysis. How close his attachment to electoral research has remained is signified by the last book he wrote:
Wahlforschung (B.I. Taschenbuchverlag Mannheim, 1992).
To many European political scientists Wildenmann is probably even better known in the role he took in creating
and developing the European Consortium of Political Research. He also was the "inventor" of ECPR's annual workshop
sessions, probably the most distinctive and productive element in the many contemporary ECPR activities.
Rudolf Wildenmann was a scholar and institution builder. Those who were close to him will probably remember him
most as a person of great warmth, never ceasing energy and hunger for life and new ideas.
Max Kaase, International University Bremen
Past winners of the Wildenmann Prize
2009
The Wildenmann Prize will be presented by André Kraiser (chairperson of the Wildenmann Prize Board)
to Johannes Lindvall of the University of Oxford for his paper presented at the 2009 Lisbon Joint
Sessions titled "The Reform Capacity of Coalition Governments".
2008
The Wildenmann Prize will be presented by Dr Ursula Hoffmann-Lange (chairperson of the Wildenmann Prize Board)
to Imke Harbers of Leiden University for her paper "Decentralization as a condition of Party System Nationalization:
Evidence from Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe" which was submitted at the Rennes Joint Sessions in 2008.
- Johannes Lindvall - 2009
- Imke Harbers - 2008
- Rune Stubager - 2007
- Kasper M. Hansen - 2006
- Martin Hering - 2005
- Lesley Hustinx - 2004
- Zsolt Enyedi - 2003
- José Fernández-Albertos - 2002
- Hanna Bäck - 2001
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