Jonathan Renshon, the Department of Political Science Board of Visitors Professor in the Department of Political Science, has been awarded a 2025 Karl Deutsch Award from the International Studies Association (ISA).
Established in 1981 to recognize scholars in international relations under the age of 45, The Karl Deutsch Award is presented annually to a scholar who is judged to have made (through a body of publications) the most significant contribution to the study of International Relations and Peace Research.
Renshon, an expert in political methodology and the psychology of international relations, is the author of Fighting for Status: Hierarchy and Conflict in International Politics, which won the 2019 John Ruggie Best Book Award from ISA and the 2017 Lepgold Prize from the Mortara Center at Georgetown University. Renshon’s research finds that states go to war over status, and the fear of losing status causes political and military leaders to fall prey to “escalation of commitment bias,” a cognitive condition in which individuals continue to invest effort and resources in a losing cause.
Renshon founded and runs the Experimental Politics Workshop, which hosts outside speakers as well as roundtables on issues related to experimentation, ethics, research transparency and design. He teaches courses on political psychology, international relations, research design and experimental methods and currently serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Experimental Political Science.
“I was totally overjoyed, as well as deeply honored to receive the Deutsch Award this year,” says Renshon. “There are lots of people doing amazing work in our field, and luck plays a big part in these things, so I was appropriately humbled to hear the news. Previous awardees were the people that I read and admired in graduate school, so it feels like it’s also a push to get back to work so I can earn it going forward!”
UW–Madison’s Department of Political Science is one of the only academic departments in the country to host three winners of the Karl Deutsch Award. In addition to Renshon, Professor Jessica Weeks won it in 2018, and Professor Jon Pevehouse won it in 2009.