Kate Baldwin wins two prizes for her new book, Faith in Democracy

Kate Baldwin, associate professor of political science and of global affairs at Yale Jackson, has won two prizes for Faith in Democracy: The Logic of Church Advocacy for Liberal Democratic Institutions in Africa.

The Hubert Morken Best Book Award, given by the American Political Science Association's Religion and Politics section, recognizes the top book of the year on religion and politics. Yale's Gustav Ranis International Book Prize, awarded by the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, honors a Yale faculty member's most outstanding work on an international topic.

"These prizes have been such an honor for me, and meaningful in different ways," Baldwin said. "For the Hubert Morken Award, it's really rewarding to know that the foremost experts in the field of religion and politics feel that my book was a contribution. I have a background in studying democracy and political accountability, but moving into the study of religion and politics was new for this book, so this award was really powerful for me."

Published in November 2025, the book draws on evidence from more than 30 countries to show that churches in sub-Saharan Africa are often at the forefront of advocating for democratic institutions, in part because checks on power protect their independence, including their control of schools. Yale Jackson explored the findings in a January research story.

The Ranis honor is one of two book prizes the MacMillan Center awards each year. Baldwin, who joined Yale in 2013, has now won both: the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize for best first book, awarded in 2018 for The Paradox of Traditional Chiefs in Democratic Africa (2016), and now the Ranis.

Baldwin has regularly taught a course on religion and politics at Yale since 2018 and organized a Yale conference on the subject in 2022, but the field sits at the edge of her home discipline.

"The MacMillan Center award was meaningful in a different way — partly because the study of religion and politics is a little on the fringe of my home field of political science, and is inherently such an interdisciplinary topic," she said. "I really leaned into the Macmillan Center’s interdisciplinary community and asked for advice from other members of it as I was getting started on the project. In particular, Michael Glerup of the Project on Religion and Society in Africa was able to make many connections for me to scholars of religion in Africa, and to clergy in Africa."

"I really don't think it would have been possible to bring this project to fruition without the help of the Council on African Studies and people from the Divinity School, who approach this topic from very different perspectives," Baldwin said. "All of this was in addition to the financial support that MacMillan gave me, as well as Yale Jackson."

Baldwin is now turning to a new project on civil society leaders, examining what moves activists from street protest into formal politics and what pulls them in and out of it. The research is in its early stages, with fieldwork underway in Ghana.

Cover photo: Sunil Amrith presents Kate Baldiwn with the Gustav Ranis International Book Prize on September 15, 2026. Amrith is the Henry R. Luce Director of the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, Vice Provost for International Affairs and the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale.