Keough School faculty member and Kellogg faculty fellow Ann Mische (sociology and peace studies) and former Kellogg PhD Fellow Tomás Gold were recognized with three honors from the American Sociological Association (ASA) for their paper "Channeling Anti-Partisan Contention: Field Structures and Partisan Strategies in a Global Protest Wave (2008–2016)," published last year in the American Journal of Sociology.
The prizes were given from three different sections of the ASA. The paper received the 2025 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship for an Article or Chapter Award from the ASA Section on Political Sociology; the 2025 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Article Award from the ASA Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements; and the2025 Best Scholarly Article Award (Honorable Mention) from ASA Section on Global and Transnational Sociology
"Channeling Anti-Partisan Contention" examines how protest movements that reject political parties – despite being seen as marginal or ineffective – can actually influence mainstream politics by enabling partisan actors to redirect anti-party sentiment toward their competitors. Focusing on the global wave of protests after 2008 across 12 countries, the authors show that partisan actors used the symbolic challenges posed by anti-partisan protestors to reshape party competition, fueling the rise of new factions, parties, coalitions, and populist leaders. The paper argues that these dynamics depend on variations in local institutional structures, or “field architectures,” which channel the effects of anti-partisan contention. Through a mix of proxy measures and narrative case studies, the authors identify four pathways by which party-movement interactions have reconfigured fields of political competition, demonstrating how symbolic contestation and institutional context collectively shape struggles over political dominance. (Read here for more information about this research.)
A Kellogg faculty fellow since 2013, Mische is associate professor of sociology and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her work focuses on processes of communication, deliberation and leadership in social movements and democratic politics.
Gold received his PhD in sociology from the University of Notre Dame in 2024. He currently is a postdoctoral research associate at the Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs at Brown University and next year will be assistant professor of sociology at the University of Southern California.