The Rinus Penninx Best Paper Award of the 2025 Annual Conference in Girona was awarded to Sebastián Umpierrez de Reguero and Mari-Liis Jakobson for their paper How Sidestreaming Works: A Conjoint Experiment on Minority; Responses to Radical Right Rhetoric in Estonia.
The jury’s comment on the paper was succinctly stated by the chair of the jury in his laudatio: “Your paper was chosen because it scored highest on all dimensions on which the jury evaluates. That is rather exceptional. Firstly, the paper focuses on a puzzling and very relevant question in politics these days: how do radical-right parties appeal to and attract migrant and minority voters, without abandoning their anti-migrant and anti-minority ideology? The phenomenon is called “sidestreaming”, defined as “the strategic use of selectively inclusionary rhetoric towards minority groups without moderating nativist, authoritarian or populist positions. Secondly, the paper makes a genuine contribution by empirically testing sidestreaming theory through a “conjoint experiment”, an innovative, well-designed and carefully implemented survey that tests the effectiveness of two sidestreaming strategies. Thirdly, implementing the survey in the Estonian context brings another contribution to theory formation on sidestreaming: the diversity base of theory-formation. Fourthly, the survey leads to important counterintuitive findings that I will not summarize here: instead I advise the audience to read the paper yourself.”