Last month, the Western Political Science Association gave the Charles Redd Award for the Best Paper on the Politics of the American West to political scientists Jack Citrin, Gabriel Lenz, and Douglas Ahler. The award was for their 2013 paper, “Do open primaries help moderate candidates? An experimental test on the 2012 California primary.”

That paper, which was published in 2013, concluded that California’s top-two primary in 2012 did not elect more moderate candidates, because the experimental evidence showed that most California voters were not informed about the ideology of candidates in their own districts.