Sara Wallace Goodman, UCI political science associate professor, is the co-recipient of the 2015 Best Book Award from the European Politics & Society section of the American Political Science Association. The honor recognizes her book, Immigration and Membership Politics in Western Europe, published last year, as the best in its field. She also received an honorable mention for the title from the Migration and Citizenship section.

The book explores why some Western European states have enacted cultural requirements as conditions for citizenship and permanent residence, including language proficiency, country knowledge and value commitments. While states have adopted similar, immigrant-directed policies, she finds they are part of strategies to address “different problems of membership, defined by inherited citizenship policy legacy and extant political preferences of the party in power.” In tracing membership policymaking in six European nation-states, she concludes national citizenship and identity are strengthened despite countervailing pressures of globalization and supranationalism.

Goodman joined the UCI faculty in fall 2009 following a six month post doctoral fellowship at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. She completed her Ph.D. in government at Georgetown University and specializes in the study of institutions of democratic inclusion in Western Europe.