Carolyn Tuohy Awarded 2020 Seymour Martin Lipset Best Book Award
The American Political Science Association Canadian Politics Section has awarded the 2020 Seymour Martin Lipset Best Book Award to Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Fellow Carolyn Hughes Tuohy for her work Remaking Policy: Scale, Pace and Political Strategy in Health Care Reform (University of Toronto Press 2018). Books eligible for the award were those dealing with Canadian politics, or incorporating Canada as a significant case in a comparative political analysis, published between 2014-2018.
Tuohy’s book offers a new way of understanding the politics of policy change, drawing on extensive interview and documentary evidence in ten cases in health policy in the US, Britain, Canada and the Netherlands to explain the political judgements that underlie four different strategies of change.
Jury members shared unreserved praise for the publication, describing it as “a magisterial book“, “a robust account of policy change by drawing on very impressive and large-scale empirical work”, “something of a landmark”, “theoretically sophisticated and useful conceptual categorizations”, “significant findings that are deeply grounded in empirical analysis”, “clearly drawn lessons and learnings from the case studies and categorizations.” Said one committee member, “I don’t know when I have read a book from which I have learned so much.”
On receiving this year’s honour, Tuohy says, “I am deeply honoured by this award, coming as it does from a body of colleagues whom I greatly admire and named as it is for Marty Lipset, whose commitment to conceptual rigour and understanding of context set a standard for comparative work to which I have always aspired.”
The awards ceremony will take place as part of the Canadian Politics Section’s business meeting during the APSA virtual conference on Friday, September 11th, 2020. Congratulations to Professor Tuohy on this most recent accolade.
