Get to your keyboards: the Guy Michelat Prize is launched

Abstract

To pay tribute to Guy Michelat, whose death we mentioned a year ago in the editorial of BMS 152, the French Political Science Association (AFSP), the Centre Emile Durkheim (CED) and the BMS have joined forces to create a prize that will bear his name. This prize is intended to encourage the publication of articles on social science methods as we at BMS understand it: articles that describe, in a reflexive way, how we carry out our research, rather than texts that tell us how we should do it. Guy Michelat was a storyteller as well as an experimenter and he never tired of looking for ideas to better measure a phenomenon. In doing so, he made a major contribution to the renewal of political sociology in France, particularly in its electoral dimension, which earned him the honours of the French Association of Political Science. Guy took the time to consider the consequences of our ways of asking questions and analysing answers on what we can say about a phenomenon. He did not hesitate to innovate, to do things differently, drawing on methods from psychology in particular. His way of doing research inspires the current BMS editorial team, supported by the CED. The prize will be awarded every two years, but it will contain two awards. Firstly, the Junior Michelat Prize is reserved for colleagues who have defended their thesis less than five years before applying. It will be awarded to a proposal for an article (five pages or about 15,000 characters) corresponding to the BMS editorial policy. The journal’s board will assist the recipient in finalising the article, which will then be translated at the expense of the CED and published in BMS in English, together with the French version online, or vice versa. Secondly, the Michelat Senior Prize, with no age limit on the candidate, will be awarded to articles already completed. It will then be translated by the CED and published in BMS in both languages. The jury will be chaired by Nonna Mayer, former president of the AFSP and one of the first to have done the BMS in 2018 the honour of publishing an article on the making of its research (‘Qualitatif ou quantitatif? Plaidoyer pour l’éclectisme méthodologique’, BMS 139: 7–33). The members of the jury will come from the BMS editorial board. For the first edition, these will be Marc-André Bodet, Mathieu Brugidou, Jérémy Dodeigne, Sophie Duchesne, Claire Dupuy, Florent Gougou and Viviane Le Hay. They reflect in part the variety that the BMS seeks to promote, in terms of qualitative or quantitative sensitivity, more or less constructivist, and belonging to diverse academic and national contexts. The prize will be awarded on the occasion of the ‘Rencontres de l’AFSP’ in July 2023. Articles can be submitted in French or English. To compete, simply send your