Christian Dyogi Phillips Receives the 2022 APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award

*Photo (from left to right): Dianne Pinderhughes (IPSA President), Christian Dyogi Phillips (2022 Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award Recipient), Lisa Martin (APSA President) and Janet Box-Steffensmeier (APSA Past President).

The 2022 APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award has been awarded to Christian Dyogi Phillips for her first book entitled Nowhere to Run: Race, Gender and Immigration in American Elections, published by Oxford University Press in 2021.

The Award Ceremony was held on 14 September at the Palais des Congrès in Montreal as part of the 2022 APSA Annual Meeting. IPSA President Dianne Pinderhughes gave a brief speech at the ceremony and talked fondly about her experience as a student of Professor Lowi and how proud she is, many years later, to have the opportunity to present the award to the 2022 recipient. Dr. Pinderhughes recalled Lowi's advice to her when she was working on her Master's Thesis at the University of Chicago: Don't get it right, get it written! She said: "At the time, I didn't recognize how wise those words were. Now I quote them to my students all the time. It was especially exciting to recognize his work with grad students and young faculty, as well as his leadership roles as former President of IPSA and APSA."

The Lowi Award recognizes the author of a first book in any field of political science that exemplifies qualities of broad ambition, high originality, and intellectual daring, showing promise of having a substantive impact on the overall discipline, regardless of method, the specific focus of inquiry or approach to the subject. The Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award has been established to honour Prof. Lowi’s distinctive contributions to the study of politics. Throughout a prolific and influential career, Prof. Lowi developed new understandings of the relationship of public policy to politics, the influence of institutional arrangements to the exercise of power, the role of ideology in the development of political parties, the relationship of democracy to law, the relevance of concept analysis for theory building.

Citation from the Award Committee: 

The committee unanimously selected Christian Dyogi Phillips’ book, Nowhere to Run: Race, Gender and Immigration in American Elections, for the 2022 Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award.  Dr. Phillips develops a new theory of intersectional politics and tests it using an original dataset (Gender Race and Communities in Elections Dataset) that includes nearly every U.S. State Legislature’s general election from 1996-2005, interviews and surveys with candidates, donors and other politicians. Her study seeks to understand the persistent lack of descriptive representation in legislatures, which continue to be dominated by white men. She finds that the characteristics of districts, rather than choices or characteristics of candidates, are the main factors. Most U.S. legislative districts are majority white, and most majority-minority districts tend to be won by men, so women of color are left with, literally, “nowhere to run.” Dr. Phillips masterfully integrates different methods of research to analyze how race, gender, and identity combine with the racial and partisan composition of districts to shape power relations and affect electoral outcomes.

Christian Dyogi Phillips is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California. Her research uses intersectional frameworks to understand how overlapping dimensions of identity inform democratic incorporation. Dr. Phillips examines how individuals and groups - from everyday voters, to people thinking about running for office, to elected incumbents - make decisions, lead, and effect change. Her work is particularly attentive to the ways that political contexts and institutions shape those processes.

In addition to her extensive work on descriptive representation and electoral politics, Dr. Phillips’ scholarship also includes studies of the substantive representation of immigrant subgroups in state legislatures, and Asian American and Latin political attitudes and participation. Her newest project is a multi-method study of how Americans’ lives as workers inform their politics.

Prior to becoming an academic, Dr. Phillips led organizing and political campaigns in the American labor movement. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in political science from UC Berkeley, M.P.A. from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and B.A. from Hampshire College.