Nicole Wilson (Northwestern University) wins the Lynne Rienner Best Dissertation Award

The African Politics Conference Group is pleased to announce that the 2025 Lynne Rienner Best Dissertation Award has been awarded to Nicole Wilson for her dissertation, "Seeing Like an Estate: Middle-Class Political Behavior After Collective Exit."

Among several excellent dissertations nominated for this award, Nicole Wilson’s “Seeing Like an Estate: Middle-Class Political Behavior After Collective Exit” stood out as an especially important and creative contribution to core literatures in African Politics. Wilson documents the growing trend of the middle class retreating from the state in Lagos and beyond, opting to live in private estates that provide services like electricity, water, and security. Building on Hirschmann’s classic theory of exit, voice, and loyalty, Wilson’s theory of "collective exit" posits that when groups of spatially-concentrated urban dwellers opt for privately-provided services, they are more likely to be tax-compliant due to the role of estate managers as tax intermediaries between citizens and the state. This argument is counterintuitive, makes a genuine innovation, and finds support in her data from Lagos.

Wilson’s data collection effort, which combines close to two million tax records with a new spatial map of Lagos private estates, is a major step forward in terms of the quality of data work in the study of African politics. Her observational analyses are careful and thorough, mitigating many potential selection issues. The selection committee congratulates her on this contribution to knowledge about urbanization, privatization, state-building, and middle-class politics.

The committee also awarded an Honorable Mention to Victor Agboga for his dissertation, "Where do your loyalties lie? Party Switching and Voters’ Response in Nigeria."

Victor Agboga’s “Where do your loyalties lie? Party Switching and Voters’ Response in Nigeria” is a careful, deep, and empirically rich study of voter responses to party switching by MPs in Nigeria. It shows that voters punish party-switchers – a crucial finding that pushes back against simplistic clientelism narratives, and challenges assumptions about weak party systems and passive electorates in Africa. Agboga’s data collection and multi-method approach are impressive. He compiled an original dataset on party switching among Nigerian legislators, conducted a nationally-representative survey of Nigerians, elite interviews, and critically analyzed media reports on party switching. He harnesses this data to generate useful insights about party switching and voter behavior in Nigeria.

The 2025 award committee was composed of Donghyun (Danny) Cho, Rosina Foli Lewis, and Janet Lewis.

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