Hilde Coffé and Marion Reiser Named Recipients of the 2025 Meisel-Laponce Award

The editors of the International Political Science Review (IPSR) are excited to announce that Hilde Coffé and Marion Reiser have been selected as the recipients of the 2025 Meisel-Laponce Award for their article titled How perceptions and information about women’s descriptive representation affect support for positive action measures.

The authors will present an award lecture on their paper during the Meisel-Laponce Award Lecture at the 2025 IPSA World Congress in Seoul on 15 July 2025. 

The Meisel-Laponce Award was created by the International Political Science Review (IPSR) to honour John Meisel and Jean Laponce, the first two editors of IPSR. The prize is awarded at every World Congress of Political Science to the best article published in IPSR in the previous two years. The first award was given at the 2012 IPSA World Congress. 

Statement of Rationale

Hilde Coffé and Marion Reiser's highly relevant article, How perceptions and information about women’s descriptive representation affect support for positive action measures, is a detailed and novel study examining the dynamics of women's representation in a parliamentary system. The article is a masterpiece of good research; it is theoretically novel, empirically sound, and very relevant. Based on data from the German Election Study coupled with an experimental design, the article illustrates that actual information on the share of female MPs has a positive effect on the population's support for gender quotes. This finding is particularly important if we consider that citizens generally tend to overestimate women's representation in parliament. Congratulations to the authors on winning this prestigious award!

The article was selected by a majority vote of the IPSR editorial board, with a record 56% of board members participating in the selection process. The other articles shortlisted for the 2025 Meisel-Laponce Award were:

Populist attitudes and challenges towards liberal democracy: An empirical assessment of the Turkish case 
Ali Çarkoğlu and Ezgi Elçi 

It's a total no-no: The strategic silence about gender in the European Parliament's economic governance policies
Anna Elomäki 

Conservatism, social isolation and political context: Why East Europeans would leave the EU in Exit referendums
Sergiu Gerghina and Paul Tap 

Online censorship and young people's use of social media to get news
Pauline Lemaire 

Mapping the drivers of negative campaigning: Insights from a candidate survey
Juergen Maier and Alessandro Nai

Should we conduct correspondence study field experiments with political elites?
Thomas Zittel, Tom Louwerse, Helene Helboe Pedersen and Wouter Schakel

Biographies

Hilde Coffé is a Professor of Politics at the University of Bath. Her main research interests include political behavior, public opinion, political representation, and gender and politics. She has been a visiting scholar at several institutions, including the University of California (Berkeley and Irvine), the University of Sydney, Åbo Akademi University, Helsinki University, SciencesPo Paris, the Spanish Scientific Research Institute, Ghent University, and the Weizenbaum Institut (Berlin).

Marion Reiser is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Jena, Germany. She holds a PhD from the University of Goettingen (2005) and a Habilitation (2014) from the University of Frankfurt. Her research interests include political representation, political parties, public opinion, and subnational politics.