Matthew Polacko is awarded the 2025 EPSR Early Careers Prize

We're delighted to announce that the 2025 Early Careers Prize has been awarded to Matthew Polacko for his outstanding contribution, Who benefits from the social democratic march to the middle?

The EPSR Early Careers Prize is awarded biennially to the best article by an early career scholar appearing in a volume of European Political Science Review (EPSR) published in the previous two years. The award recognises an article which produces inventive and momentous research on politics.

The winning article  explores how social democratic parties have experienced considerable electoral decline recently, which has often been attributed to their rightward policy movement. This paper advances this literature by examining who benefits from this moderation strategy and who is abandoning the social democrats.

Our winner

Matthew Polacko is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Calgary. His research interests lie at the intersection of political economy and political behaviour with a particular focus on class politics and the consequences of inequality on political behaviour.

In his own words

I am thrilled to have been awarded the EPSR Early Career Prize. It is highly rewarding to read the jury’s kind words highlighting my work into the importance of addressing a key puzzle in comparative politics: why social democratic parties have declined electorally, and which parties have profited from this shift. Receiving the EPSR Early Career Prize is very encouraging to keep researching this important contemporary topic with a temporal focus.

Jury members

• Luana Russo, Maastricht University (Chair)
• Susan Banducci, University of Birmingham
• Andreas Dür, University of Salzburg

Honourable mentions

The jury is pleased to award two honourable mentions to Matthias Diermeier for his article, Tailoring the truth – evidence on parliamentarians’ responsiveness and misinformation toleration from a field experiment and Lea Kaftan for her article, Lip service to liberal democracy in Western Europe?

Read more on The Loop

Matthew's Polacko's blog piece, Can policy choice reduce the income gap in voting?, is available to read on The Loop.