Ph.D. Candidate Andrew O’Donohue has been granted the 2024 Best Conference Paper Award from the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Law and Courts Section. O’Donohue was recognized for his paper, “Law versus Democracy: Minoritarian Courts, Audience Costs, and Democratic Backsliding in Turkey”, an in-depth study examining how judicial institutions may inadvertently contribute to democratic erosion.
The award honors the best paper on law and politics presented at APSA’s annual meeting and showcases groundbreaking research in the field. O’Donohue’s innovative paper challenges the prevailing belief that independent, counter-majoritarian courts inherently function as protectors of democratic norms. Instead, through rich theoretical insight and empirical rigor, he argues that minoritarian judicial institutions can unintentionally fuel democratic backsliding by drawing political fire away from executives who are dismantling democratic protections.
The award committee praised the paper’s “theoretical contribution, novel data collection, rigorous mixed methods approach, and timely contribution to the literature.” O’Donohue’s work—which incorporates original data from Turkey’s Constitutional Court, elite interviews, and content analysis of Turkish newspapers—offers new perspectives on the complex interplay between law and politics in fragile democracies.
O’Donohue said: “I am honored to receive this recognition from my fellow political scientists and grateful to my advisors here at Harvard for many years of mentorship. I hope this research can help us understand how to renovate democratic institutions so that the courts can fulfill their promise as guardrails of democracy at a time when they are newly important in cases of democratic backsliding.”
O’Donohue has also written recently in The Atlantic and Foreign Policy to share lessons for the United States from other democracies in which powerful executives have challenged the courts. His research draws upon more than 60 interviews with high-ranking judges and legal experts in Israel and Turkey, as well as analysis of thousands of decisions in which courts reviewed the constitutionality of government policies.
The honor reflects both the intellectual ambition of O’Donohue’s research and his contribution to the broader understanding of democratic decline and judicial politics. The award will be presented at the Law and Courts Section meeting during APSA’s conference in Vancouver this September.