Best Graduate Paper 2019

The winner of the EISA´s Best Graduate Paper 2019 award is Dawid Walentek  for his paper "Economic Peace Revisited".

The abstract of the paper:

Scholars have argued over whether democratic peace also holds in the realm of economic sanctions – whether there is an economic peace. Substantial amounts of evidence have been gathered both for and against economic peace. However, findings have been extremely sensitive to changes in research design – new data or changes in statistical methods have led to divergent results. In this article we provide new insight, with the use of the updated TIES data set and new methodology, into the topic of economic peace. We find that democracies are more likely to issue economic sanctions, and that there is no economic peace. In fact,  emocracies are more likely to sanction one another. We indicate that lack of economic peace is consistent with the public choice approach to economic sanctions. Democratic political leaders seek to secure broad  coalition and use sanctions to address foreign policy and protectionist domestic demands.

The committee comment:

This well-rounded paper stands out for its sound and creative methodological approach and a mature research strategy. The very concept of economic peace deserves recognition against the backdrop of recent economic and trade developments at the global and regional level. The paper offers an excellent elaboration of the linkage between peace, stability, sanctions and conditionality. It asks stimulating research questions, poses well-placed hypotheses, identifies gaps in previous research and offers well-crafted research techniques, including an econometric model. The conclusions of the paper reflect appropriately the range and scope of the presented research results.