I just received news that I am the winner of the Gordon Smith and Vincent Wright Memorial Prizes for the best article published in West European Politics during 2020 for my article: Seeberg, Henrik Bech (2020). ‘Issue ownership attack: How a political party can counteract a rival’s issue ownership’. West European Politics.43(4): 772-794. LINK download. Needless to say, I am of course incredibly happy and proud to have received this prize among so many great publications in this strong journal! Thanks WEP!

I am very pleased to see that my most recent research has been accepted for publication in Party Politics. The manuscript is entitled ‘Avoidance and Engagement in the Electoral Cycle: Selective Emphasis, then Issue Convergence between Political Parties'. Please find a link to download the study on this homepage under publications here. 

Super excited that my paper co-authored with the fabolous Jonas Lefevere & Stefaan Walgrave has now been published in Political Communication. We study how a party can attack & undermine a rival's issue reputations (performance, priority, and position) as well as cross-effects. More: 
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10584609.2020.1760407?scroll=top&needAccess=true&journalCode=upcp20#.Xs4hzTJrf8k.twitter

We have four pieces of good news to share:

1. The CAP2021 conference will take place 28-30 June 2021 in Aarhus! 
2. The Israeli team has offered to host the CAP2022 conference in Israel. Dates and more info to follow in 2021.
   
3. We have a winner of the inaugural ”Bryan D. Jones Prize”. The prize is awarded for the best paper presented by a junior scholar at the previous CAP-conference (this year, that was from Budapest 2019). The winner is Alice Cavalieri from the University of Siena, with a paper entitled “The Shape of the Budget. European Countries’ Public Expenditure in the last twenty years”. The award committee (Miklós Sebók, Rens Vliegenhart,  and Christoffer Green-Pedersen) has asked Bryan for his reaction to the winning paper: “Alice Cavalieri’s paper, The Shape of the Budget, provides the most complete look at budget outputs from the vantage point of policy process theory, and in particular punctuated equilibrium, that we have to date. She studies budgetary changes during the period from 1996 to 2017 for thirty European countries, finding the now-classic leptokurtic budgetary pattern for all countries and budget categories aggregated.  The pattern is almost symmetrical, whereas most other distributions have been somewhat right skewed, perhaps a result of the severe austerity in Europe after the Great Recession. Then Cavalieri develops models based on economic, institutional and political factors across countries. She finds a strong association between economic growth, lagged three fiscal years, and reduced punctuations. Legal constraints on budgets lower budgetary punctuations, and as does partisan polarization. Parliamentary fragmentation probably increases punctuations. The most exciting part of the paper is the number of new theses that this new dataset will allow Cavalieri and other policy scholars to explore. The inclusion of economic, structural, and political variables in the dataset will allow deep exploration of just how particular variables within specific countries operate, among other things. The Shape of the Budget is already a major contribution to our understanding of budgetary politics, and promises many more insights as Cavalieri’s research program goes forward.” The award committee read a large number of intriguing papers and would also like to mention three papers that were close competitors to the winning one: Nick Or: How Economic “Globalization Shapes Executive Speeches”; Klaus Jonathan Klüser: “Beyond Ministerial Portfolios”; Chris Butler: ”Are UK governments more responsive on the issues that matter more to their own supporters?”
4. We will organize a virtual CAP2020 mini-conference on 1 July 2020 from 4-6 pm (London time).
   
5. At this mini-conference, we start with a short plenary and then we divide into separate virtual rooms with 3-4 presentations in each room (like a normal panel). This opportunity to present is mainly reserved for junior scholars at the cancelled CAP2020 (but senior scholars may also apply and we will do our best to accommodate all presenters). Please apply for this opportunity to present at the virtual mini-conference by sending an email to Henrik Bech Seeberg (h.seeberg[at]ps[dot]au[dot]dk). Deadline 12 May. Please also send him an email if you have an item for the plenary agenda. The conference will take place over Zoom. Our university has an institutional license and thereby can guarantee full data safety (please get back to us asap if you have concerns about this). More info with a link to access the virtual conference later.

The CAP2020 conference in Aarhus is cancelled. We are super disappointed and very sad to have to make this decision. We will come back strong for the CAP2021 next year in Aarhus! We will announce the date for the CAP2021 conference in Aarhus as soon as possible. There will be a new call for abstracts during the fall and registration next spring.
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https://ps.au.dk/forskning/konferencer/cap2020/

Incredibly happy to see my manuscript ‘“Don’t trust that party!” Undermining a rival party’s issue ownership through negative campaigning’, with my friend and good colleague Alessandro Nai accepted for publication in Political Studies. In a series of experiments, we test to what extent a party can use negative campaigning to attack a rival party's issue ownership. This manuscript had a long and tough way to publication so it feels amazing to finally set it coming forward. Thanks for the great work Alessandro!

Friday afternoon, Frederik Jørgensen defended his dissertation on the consequences of integration policy change at Dept. of Political Science at Aarhus University. I had the privilege to chair the assessment committee and had lots of fun and learned a lot together with Sara Wallace Goodman (UC Irvine) and Merlin Schäeffer (Copenhagen).

Together with my brilliant co-authors, Shaun Bevan and Enrico Borghetto, I just handed over our contribution to Routledge Handbook of Policy Styles, edited by Mike Howlett and Jale Tosun. Writing it was a lot of fun and this is only the beginning of our collaborative research on opposition party behavior in parliament. Stay tuned!