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"No I in Team" Receives Leading Awards
An Acadia University professor’s book has received two of the leading academic awards for scholarship on Canadian politics.
Dr. Alex Marland (Politics), Jarislowsky Chair in Trust and Political Leadership, along with co-authors Jared Wesley and Mireille Lalancette, have been awarded the 2026 Seymour Martin Lipset Best Book Award for No I in Team: Party Loyalty in Canadian Politics, (University of Toronto Press, 2025).
The prestigious Seymour Martin Lipset Best Book Award is given by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honour a significant contemporary contribution to the scholarship on Canadian politics, or Canada in a comparative perspective, or a comparative analysis of Canada with other countries, particularly the United States.
This is not the first award No I in Team has received. In June, Alex and his co-authors were awarded the 2026 Donald Smiley Prize, which recognizes the author of the best book published in English and French in a field relating to the study of government and politics in Canada.
Drawing on four decades of caucus departure data spanning the House of Commons and all ten provincial legislatures, more than 3,300 news stories, and ninety interviews conducted in both official languages, No I in Team shows that party discipline extends far beyond how members vote on bills to encompass everyday message discipline — what elected members feel able to say, in any venue, at any time. The book illuminates the quiet mechanisms of anticipation and expectation that keep parliamentarians in line more often than formal sanction does, and it traces the costs of that discipline in the questions that go unasked and the constituents who go unheard. No I in Team will become an indispensable reference for scholars of Canadian legislative behaviour, party politics, and representation.