Gjerløw, Kronborg, and Stiansen Named Recipients of the 2025 David M. Olson Award

The IPSA Research Committee on Legislative Specialists (RC08) is pleased to announce that the 2025 David M. Olson Award for the Best Paper in Legislative Studies has been awarded to Haakon Gjerløw, Anton Kronborg and Øyvind Stiansen for their paper, Debating Threats to Authoritarian Rule: Inclusion and Discrimination in the Legislative Council of Northern Rhodesia, which was presented at the 2025 IPSA World Congress in Seoul. 

"The award jury noted that this paper stands out for its creative use of historical data and its relevance to broader questions of representation and institutional change. It brings fresh insight to how legislatures function in authoritarian contexts—an area that deserves more attention in the field. Drawing on a newly compiled dataset of colonial legislative debates, the authors explore how limited African representation affected discourse in a racially exclusive legislature under British colonial rule. Your findings—particularly those related to elite adaptation, institutional tension, and the strategic use of discrimination—are both theoretically rich and empirically original."

Haakon Gjerløw is a senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). His research focuses on political institutions, domestic politics, mass mobilization, and human development. 

Anton Kronborg is a Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oslo (UiO). In his dissertation, he combined natural language processing methods and various sources of individual-level data to study elite political behavior across elections and regime changes.

Øyvind Stiansen is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo. His research focuses on political institutions and judicial politics. 

The David M. Olson Award

David M. Olson was one of the founders of the RC08 – Legislative Specialists and served as Co-Chair of the Committee from 2000 to 2006.  The purpose of the David M. Olson Award is to honor outstanding research in parliamentary/legislative studies. The recipients are rewarded for the best paper presented in one of the RC08 panels at either the latest IPSA World Congress or at any conferences or panels organized by RC08 between the previous two Congresses.