The Merze Tate – Elinor Ostrom Outstanding Book Awardis presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best book on government, politics, or international affairs.
In Uprooted: How Post-WWII Population Transfers Remade Europe(Cambridge University Press, 2024), Volha Charnysh draws on vast and varied sources of evidence to support the strikingly original hypothesis that mass migration flows of diverse populations at first pull communities apart but then, over decades, make those communities significantly more resilient, entrepreneurial, and wealthy. Using data from Poland and West Germany and studying both within-case and across-case variation, Charnysh reexamines existing theories about the consequences of mass migration and ethnic diversity for state building, goods provision, and economic development. She shows that heterogeneous communities – because of the challenges that they have in cooperating – appeal to the state to provide collective and private goods, which helps to build state capacity. Increased state capacity, and the skills and knowledge that come with heterogeneous migrant populations, support long-run economic performance. To conduct the analysis, Charnysh collected and georeferenced original data for over a thousand historical municipalities. She also studied the memoirs of migrants in order to understand narratives of nationhood and boundary-making during the period that she explores. Over the course of the book, she studies outcomes ranging from the formation of volunteer fire brigades to municipal tax rates, to entrepreneurship, to the acceptance of economic reforms, to voting patterns. This provocative and deeply researched book will undoubtedly spur new thinking on ethnic politics, collective action, migration, state capacity, taxation, and other core questions in political science, economics, and sociology.
