30Sep 2025
David Olson Award 2025 for "Debating threats to Authoritarian Rule"
21:08 - By RCLS
The Research Committee of Legislative Specialists (RC08), IPSA awarded the 2025 David Olson Award to the following paper presented at the World Congress 2025: Debating threats to authoritarian rule: Inclusion and Discrimination in the Legislative Council of Northern Rhodesia by Haakon Gjerløw, Anton Kronborg, and Øyvind Stiansen.
left to right: Haakon Gjerløw, Anton Kronborg, Øyvind Stiansen
The Jury noted that this paper stands out for its creative use of historical data and its relevance to broader questions of representation and institutional change. It brings fresh insight to how legislatures function in authoritarian contexts—an area that deserves more attention in the field. Drawing on a newly compiled dataset of colonial legislative debates, the authors explore how limited African representation affected discourse in a racially exclusive legislature under British colonial rule. Your findings—particularly those related to elite adaptation, institutional tension, and the strategic use of discrimination—are both theoretically rich and empirically original.
- Haakon Gjerløw is a senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). His research focuses on political institutions, domestic politics, mass mobilization, and human development.
- Anton Kronborg is a Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oslo (UiO). In his dissertation, he combined natural language processing methods and various sources of individual-level data to study elite political behavior across elections and regime changes.
- Øyvind Stiansen is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo. His research focuses on political institutions and judicial politics.