Professor Carles Boix, researcher at the Universitat de Barcelona School of Economics, has received Choice’s Outstanding Academic Title award for his book Political Order and Inequality. Every year the Association of College & Research Libraries releases a list of the best scholarly titles reviewed by its publishing unit Choice. Boix’s Political Order and Inequality describes the foundations of stateless societies, why and how states emerge and the basis of political obligation. As a result of this inquiry, the book explains the economic and political roots of inequality, describes the causes of the stagnation of the preindustrial world and explores what led to the West’s prosperity of the past two centuries.

Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles list contains approximately 10% of some 7,000 works reviewed each year. Editors apply several criteria to reviewed titles, including overall excellence in presentation and scholarship, importance relative to other literature in the field, distinction as a first treatment of a given subject in book or electronic form, originality or uniqueness of treatment, value to undergraduate students and importance in building undergraduate library collections.

Professor Carles Boix has recently joined the Universitat de Barcelona School of Economics, where he is leading the Institutions and Political Economy Research Group (IPERG), whose mission is to foster the study of the role of institutions on the emergence of political order and stability, the political representation of individual and social interests and economic development and redistribution. Boix is also leading the research project “The Birth of Party Democracy. The Emergence of Mass Parties and the Choice of Electoral Laws in Europe and North America (1870-1940)”, for which he obtained an Advanced Grant, a prestigious grant given by the European Research Council (ERC) to senior researchers.