MPSA Awards

Do International Employment Opportunities Impact Individuals’ Political Preferences and Behavior?

By Nikhar Gaikwad, Kolby Hanson, and Aliz Toth Robert H. Durr Award for Best Paper “applying quantitative methods to a substantive problem,” presented at the 2019 Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting Millions of people around the world migrate overseas for employment each year, and…


Their economic pain, our emotional gain: Can schadenfreude motivate responses to redistributive policies?

By Hannah Nam, Samuel Jens, and Yanna Krupnikov New Jersey is one of the first states expected to adopt a “millionaires tax” that raises taxes on those who make over a million dollars a year. In announcing the new policy, the state’s governor, Phil Murphy, stated, “We do not hold any grudge at all…


Govern the Ungoverned: How State Presence Leads to Civil Conflict

By Luwei Ying, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis Govern the Ungoverned


Understanding and Reducing Biases in Elite Beliefs About the Electorate 

by Miguel M. Pereira, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis.


How Ideology, Economics and Institutions Shape Affective Polarization in Democratic Polities

Summary by Noam Gidron, James Adams, and Will Horne Concerns over the health of democratic norms and institutions have intensified in recent years (e.g., Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018), with political polarization often cited as a key driver of democratic dysfunction. The rise of affective polarization…


Blue is Black and Red is White? Affective Polarization and the Racialized Schemas of U.S. Party Coalitions

By Nicholas A. Valentino and Kirill Zhirkov  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFMTdNxp57k] Affective polarization - the mutual partisan antipathy expressed by both Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. - has increased dramatically over the last 30 years. Both real-life political processes…


Ethnic Networks

The following is part of a series of posts written by MPSA award recipients highlighting outstanding research presented at previous MPSA annual conferences and in the American Journal of Political Science. The following AJPS Author Summary was first published on the AJPS website and is shared here…


How Governments Influence Competition between Militant Groups

By Justin Conrad and William Spaniel When Algeria descended into violence in the 1990s, two militant groups – the Islamic Salvation Army (AIS) and the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) – competed for supremacy of the rebel movement. The competition between the two groups, in fact, became a major source of…