Prof. Chitralekha Basu and Prof. Matthew Knowles have been awarded the 2026 Elinor Ostrom Prize for the best paper published in the Journal of Theoretical Politics in the previous year. The prize recognizes their paper, "The Revelation Incentive for Issue Engagement in Campaigns."
In announcing the prize, the editors of the Journal of Theoretical Politics highlighted the paper’s contribution to resolving a longstanding puzzle in the study of campaign issue selection:
"For decades, formal models of campaign issue selection have rested on a single premise — that emphasizing an issue raises its salience — and have accordingly predicted that parties should talk only about the issues that favor them, and never about the same issues as their rivals. The empirical record stubbornly refuses to cooperate: parties routinely address unfavorable issues, and competing parties converge on the same salient ones. Basu and Knowles resolve this tension with one elegant and generative move. They observe that emphasis does not only make an issue feel important; it also tells voters where a party actually stands. From this second effect they isolate a new primitive — the revelation incentive — the pull to speak on an already-salient issue in order to reach the intense minority who would otherwise defect out of uncertainty. That single addition allows their model of multiparty competition to reproduce, in equilibrium, all five of the campaign regularities that had eluded prior theory, and it reframes a broader question about democratic accountability: when the revelation incentive dominates the salience incentive, elections compel parties to engage the issues voters already care about rather than to manufacture an agenda of their own.
It is a model in the best tradition the prize honors — spare in its assumptions, surprising in its consequences, and immediately useful to others."
Read the full paper here.