2024

The Beth Holmgren Graduate Student Essay Prize, established in 1990 and named in honor of Professor Holmgren in 2021, is awarded for an outstanding essay by a graduate student in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.  

Winner: Silviya Nitsova, “Oligarchic Networks of Influence and Legislatures in Developing Democracies: Evidence from Ukraine” (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2023)  

Silviya Nitsova’s essay is an exploration of an important substantive topic, based on rich and original data collection and executed with state-of-the-art methodological sophistication. The paper tackles a deceptively simple, yet expansive and complex question of interdisciplinary relevance in political science and economics, namely “why do businesspeople enter politics?” Nitsova uses Ukraine as a case study to provide a convincing answer: in democracies with high levels of political competition but weak rule of law, the mega-rich enter politics as a wealth defense strategy. They form clusters of loyalists in parliament, who cooperate in informal groups and highly fragmented networks to try to ensure that the interests of the mega rich are represented in legislative voting across different policy areas. The meticulous, almost forensic, data collection on individual MPs, their biographies and voting records, yields a massive dataset with over 800,000 observations, which provides a solid basis for Nitsova’s advanced network analysis. The paper makes an empirical and theoretical contribution to several disciplinary subfields. Perhaps most importantly, Nitsova’s study provides policy implications for Ukraine’s further reforms aimed at improving the quality of its democracy on the road to EU accession.   

Honorable Mentions: Mikhail Svirin and John Webley

Prize Committee: Maria Popova (chair), Adeeb Khalid, and Roman Utkin