The Charles H. Levin Memorial Book Prize 2021 goes to "Advising Governments in the Westminster Tradition: Policy Advisory Systems in Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand" by Jonathan Craft and John Halligan- Congratulations!
The Award Committee has selected “Advising Governments in the Westminster Tradition: Policy Advisory Systems in Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand” by Jonathan Craft and John Halligan as the 2021 recipient of the Levine Award. This impressive book advances our knowledge on varieties of policy advisory systems in Westminister type governments. The book traces the implications of advisory systems for policy making in four anglophone countries that place pragmatic and instrumental Anglo administrative tradition at their centers. The authors provide rich empirical and theoretical explanations for the varieties within Westminister policy advisory systems across countries. They offer compelling evidencethat the decisions and actions of principal individuals and organisational political actors affect the politicisation, externalisation, and control of policy advice. They further show how the autonomy and impact of policy advisors are shaped by dynamic country-specific structural, institutional, and agential factors that evolve over time.
“Advising Governments in the Westminster Tradition” is an excellent example of detailed, theoretically-informed, comparative case analysis. It will be of special interest to scholars interested in the policy process in Westminster systems, and the comparative study of the core executive. The award committee is pleased to recognize it with this year’s Levine Prize.
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Each year, the International Political Science Association’s Research Committee on the Structure of Governance sponsors the Levine Prize. It is named in honour of Charles H. Levine, who was a distinguished member of the Research Committee and served on the editorial board of its official journal, Governance. The prize is awarded on the recommendation of a distinguished committee for the best book on comparative administration or public policy published in the previous year. This year’s committee was composed of Professors Jale Tosun (University of Heidelberg, Germany), Caner Bakir (Koç University, Turkey) and Robert Cox (University of South Carolina, United States).
