Ning Leng Named the Recipient of the 2026 APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award

We are delighted to announce that Ning Leng has been named as the recipient of the 2026 APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award for her first book titled Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party-State in China, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. Ning Leng is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. 

Citation from the Award Committee

The committee unanimously selected Ning Leng’s Politicizing Business: How Firms are Made to Serve the Party-State in China, as the winner of the 2026 Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award. Leng offers an ambitious and compelling analysis of the relationship between the state and a capitalist economy under one party rule. By focusing on state encroachment on the private sector in “mundane” and everyday areas such as urban transit and paper manufacturing, the book argues that firms are compelled to provide political services for the state in a relatively “hidden arena” for firm competition. 

Leng brings a uniquely rich array of data to bear on this argument. Her multi-method study leverages quantitative analyses of original data on privatization, and hundreds of interviews with officials and business leaders, to expose how the state uses encroachment to boost the visibility and legitimacy of local leaders, and extend the surveillance and social control capacity of the party.  Politicizing Business’ account is delivered with notably clear and fluid prose, and moves engagingly between on the ground observations of puzzling public projects, to estimations of the likelihood private firms endure, to in-depth views from key actors. 

The book sits at the crossroads of several major debates in political science: the study of authoritarian regimes, political economy, corruption, state capacity, mafia groups, local governments, and business-state linkages. Leng’s work clearly echoes the spirit of the Lowi Award in its concern with how the modality of state action constitutes politics, and is widely relevant across subfields of political science. 

Biography

Ning Leng is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. She specializes in the political economy of China and Global China. Her first book, Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party-State in China (Cambridge University Press, 2025), examines how the Chinese party-state mobilizes businesses for infrastructure development and societal control, as well as the political and economic outcomes that follow. Her other publications examine China’s public service provision, privatization and de-privatization, authoritarian control of government officials, businesspeople, and academics, and public opinion toward China’s economic expansion in the Global South. She is working on a second book on Chinese companies in South America. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is a Wilson China Fellow for 2025-2026, a Penn Project Fellow on the Future of U.S.-China Relations for 2026-2027, and a Carnegie China Fellow for 2026-2027.

IPSA thanks the committee members for their service: Christian Dyogi Phillips (Chair) of the University of Southern California; Stephanie Rickard, London School of Economics and Political Science; Neil Chaturvedi, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; Elisa Chelle of Paris Nanterre University; and Min Hee Go of Ewha Womans University