Congratulations to Benjamin Rohr and his coauthor John Levi Martin for receiving the 2026 Charles Tilly Best Article Award for their article “The State and the Emergence of the First American Party System: Roll Call Voting in the New York State Assembly during the Early Republic”. The award is given out every year by the American Sociological Association’s section on Comparative-Historical Sociology for the best article in the subfield. Drawing on a newly constructed dataset of roll-call votes and legislator characteristics from the New York State Assembly, the article shows that durable partisan coordination took shape at the state level earlier than existing accounts suggest, and did so before party consolidation at the national level. Rather than tracing party formation to ideological sorting or preexisting social cleavages, the article locates its origins in elite struggles over the resources generated by early state expansion, offering a new account of how state building and party building shaped one another in the early American republic.