2025 Best Paper on Public Policy Winner Announced!

From the Standing Group on Public Policy

We are delighted to announce the winner of the 2025 prize for the Best Paper Presented at the Public Policy Section at the ECPR General Conference:

‘Narrative Power in Electoral Autocracies: Policy Narrative Behind the Unlikely Success of the Turkish Pension Movement’ by Elifcan Celebi (University College Dublin) and Volkan Yilmaz (Ulster University, Belfast).

The jury members (Claire A. Dunlop, Johanna Kuenzler and Giliberto Capano) selected the winning paper from a pool of six submissions. They particularly commended the paper for its fascinating case study applying the Narrative Policy Framework in a non-democratic context. The paper demonstrates convincingly how the Turkish pension movement built a successful campaign under an authoritarian government by keeping the ‘villain’ deliberately vague — a genuinely original finding that extends the Narrative Policy Framework beyond Western democracies.

The jury highlighted the paper’s strong empirical grounding, its transparent analysis, and its significant contribution in linking theory to practice in an authoritarian setting. The paper is diligently written and does an excellent job of introducing readers to the Turkish context, making it a compelling read.

In deliberating, the jury assessed papers based on their scientific quality and their contribution to public policy research, while also giving particular consideration to the work of early-career scholars.

We would also like to congratulate all authors of papers submitted to the prize, which the jury found to be of very high quality and potential to make significant contributions to existing knowledge.

Keywords: Public Policy