Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow Best Article Award HM 2026: Erica S. Simmons and Nicholas Rush Smith, for “How Cases Speak to One Another: Using Translation to Rethink Generalization…”

Honorable Mention: Erica S. Simmons (University of Wisconsin, Madison) and Nicholas Rush Smith (SOAS University of London), “How Cases Speak to One Another: Using Translation to Rethink Generalization in Political Science Research,” American Political Science Review 120, no. 1 (2026): 110–122.

Simmons and Smith’s “How Cases Speak to One Another” (2025) takes on one of the most fundamental questions of social scientific research. What do we mean when we say an argument generalizes? In the discipline’s prevailing answers, to generalize is for the same argument to hold, unchanged, beyond the cases studied. That demand places scholars working in qualitative, and especially interpretive, traditions in a bind: overclaim what their evidence warrants or underclaim the reach of what they have found. Simmons and Smith chart a way out by introducing translation as an alternative framework for understanding what generalization entails in qualitative case-based research. To translate is to move recursively between contexts, asking not whether an argument replicates but which of its elements remain intelligible elsewhere. The frictions that emerge, where cases resemble one another without mapping neatly, push scholars to rethink their theories and develop new ones. By naming a practice many already engage in and specifying what it involves, the article gives scholars language to describe and defend work too often misunderstood. Restoring creativity and imagination to the center of inquiry, the article provides an indispensable guide for how practitioners of interpretive methods can hone their craft.

Selection Committee:
Reo Matsuzaki (Chair), Trinity College
Tamir Moustafa, Simon Fraser University
Johanna Söderström, Uppsala University