2021 SPSA Endowments and Awards
Malcolm Jewell Award
2021 Malcolm Jewell Award is given to the author(s) of the Best Graduate Student Paper presented at the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association
Speaking and Leading with Negativity: The Strategic Use of Negative Sentiment in U.S. Congressional Messages
Whitney Hua, University of Southern California
Maggie Macdonald, Emory University
The SPSA’s Malcolm Jewell Award for the best graduate student paper presented at the previous year’s meeting is an important recognition of research by emerging scholars. Mac Jewell was a valued contributor to research on state legislative politics and was mentor to numerous students at the University of Kentucky, many of whom continue to mentor students of legislative politics. The 2020 Malcom Jewell Award goes to Whitney Hua (University of Southern California) and Maggie Macdonald (Emory University) for their paper “Speaking and Leading with Negativity: The Strategic Use of Negative Sentiment in U.S. Congressional Messages.”
Hua and Macdonald’s paper sheds light on an increasingly important facet of American political life: the use of tweets to convey political messages. Their analysis shows that members of Congress who are in the opposing party to the president are most likely to issue negative tweets. The authors analyze about 1.7 million tweets from the 113th-115th Congresses, covering the years 2013 to 2018. They also manually revise the existing dictionary to ensure that items defined as negative are in fact negative. This was an enormous undertaking that should benefit other researchers. The authors separate tweets by whether they are in an election year or not, and in each case find that members with less power, either by party control or electoral competition, are more likely to use negative texts than members who operate from a position of greater strength. This is especially pronounced during campaigns, where institutionally weaker members are about two times more likely to resort to negative tweeting than during non-campaign periods. This is not to say that negative messaging stops when the campaign ends: negative messages appear to be used increasingly in both campaigns and non-campaigns, suggesting that we may be moving into an age of permanent campaigning tinged with negative messages.
The committee received several papers that contended strongly for the award. The Hua and Macdonald paper impressed the committee in its timeliness, the care and attention the authors devoted to improving a large dataset, and in being well argued and written. It is a strong addition to a growing literature on the uses of social media in politics and the committee agreed that it is a worthy recipient of the Malcolm Jewell Award.
______________________________________________________________________________
Marian Irish Award
The 2021 Marian Irish Award goes to the author(s) of the Best Paper on Women and Politics presented at the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association:
What Misperceptions Can Teach Us About Symbolic Representation
Katelyn Stauffer, University of South Carolina
How do beliefs and perceptions about gender representation influence citizens’ understanding of government efficacy? The study of political efficacy has been central to public opinion research and scholarship on democratic legitimacy. However, previous research has not fully considered how citizens perceive and misperceive membership in political institutions, and how those (mis)perceptions might influence attitudes about government efficacy and legitimacy. Drawing upon heterogeneity in respondent beliefs about women’s representation, Stauffer theorizes that respondents who believe women to be well-represented will exhibit higher levels of political efficacy than those who believe women are underrepresented in politics. She evaluates her argument using three different tests derived from the Cooperative Congressional Elections Study, and presents convincing evidence that beliefs about women’s representation in political institutions affects political efficacy and democratic legitimacy. The committee was so impressed with Stauffer’s exemplary work. Her theoretical argument and empirical tests are carefully crafted and nuanced. We are pleased to name her paper as the winner of the Marian Irish Award.
______________________________________________________________________________
Neal Tate Award
The 2021 Neal Tate Award is given to the author(s) of the Best Paper on Judicial Politics presented at the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association:
How Does Education Affect Public Support for Courts?
Sivaram Cheruvu, Emory University
“On behalf of the Neal Tate Award Committee (comprised of myself, Chair Chris Bonneau, Logan Strother, and Vanessa Baird), I am pleased to award this prize to Siv Cheruvu of Emory University. His paper, “How does Education affect Public Support for Courts?”, is an excellent combination of nuanced theory and careful empirical analysis. He finds that an additional year of exposure to a more open school environment and the West German school curriculum after the fall of the Berlin Wall caused an increase in East Germans’ support for the German Federal Constitutional Court. This specific finding has implications for the role of courts in new democracies, how education can shift political attitudes (especially towards the courts and other political institutions), and the importance of careful and clear connections between theory and empirics. We are happy to recognize Siv for this excellent work. Congratulations.”
______________________________________________________________________________
Pi Sigma Alpha Award
The 2021 Pi Sigma Alpha Best Paper Award is given to the author(s) of the Best Overall Paper presented at the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association:
What Misperceptions Can Teach Us About Symbolic Representation
Katelyn Stauffer, University of South Carolina
This is an excellent paper. It combines theoretical insight with careful empirical work to support a novel and important conclusion: *perceptions* of symbolic representation are a more powerful influence on political beliefs than the *actual* level of this representation. The paper’s findings suggest new questions about the interrelationship of fact and belief that are especially relevant to the modern study of mass political behavior.
______________________________________________________________________________
Manning Dauer Award
The 2021 Manning Dauer Award is presented biennially to a political scientist for exceptional service to the profession.
Stacia Haynie, Louisiana State University
The 2021 award will go to Stacia Haynie from Louisiana State University.
Stacia is a well-known scholar in judicial politics who has been extremely active in the Southern Political Science Association even as she has risen in the administrative ranks at LSU where she currently serves as executive vice president and provost.
Her scholarship has been published in The Journal of Politics, Law and Society Review, Political Research Quarterly, and State Politics and Policy Quarterly. Her engagement in the discipline includes leadership in the Southwest Political Science Association, the Midwest Political Science Association and the American Political Science Association. But it is her role in the SPSA that is most notable and meaningful. Her involvement with SPSA began in 1997 when she first chaired a section for the annual meeting and continues today through her membership in the finance committee. In addition to chairing numerous key SPSA committees, she has served on the executive council and as secretary and as treasurer. In that last role, her leadership was pivotal in helping the association overcome financial stresses and meet obligations that helped strengthen SPSA and insure its future success.
Stacia’s leadership, commitment and scholarship over the past two decades is an embodiment of exceptional service to the profession.
Committee members:
Carol Weissert, chair
Jon Bond
John Ishiyama
Sara Mitchell
______________________________________________________________________________
Arnold Vedlitz Award
The 2021 Arnold Vedlitz Award is presented to the author(s) of the Best Paper on Environmental Politics presented at the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association
Updating and Synthesizing our Understanding of State Legislative Support for Climate Change Policy
JoyAnna Hopper, University of the South
Clint S. Swift, University of the South
______________________________________________________________________________
Joseph Bernd Award
2021 Joseph L. Bernd JOP Best Paper Award is presented to the authors of the Best Paper published in the Journal of Politics in 2020:
Shifting Standards: How Voters Evaluate the Qualifications of Female and Male Candidates
Nichole Bauer, Louisiana State University
Bauer investigates why candidates face different odds of electoral success based on their gender. She hypothesizes that women’s rise to political prominence occurs not because of a lack of gender-based discrimination but rather in spite of it. Women running for office, she theorizes, require disproportionately more qualifications than do men vying for the same job. Bauer’s theory rests on psychological theories of shifting standards and she tests the applicability of these theories to electoral politics with a series of experiments. She finds that female candidates are viewed as more skilled than men but this does not translate into more electoral support for them. With a novel design, Bauer than asks respondents to identify the number of skills that two competing candidates should have in order to qualify for office; by manipulating the gender of the opposing candidate, Bauer finds that women are expected to hold significantly more skills than men in order to serve as an elected representative. This work provides an important theoretical advance to how we can understand gender-based discrimination in politics—that of shifting standards—and it puts forth robust empirical evidence based on multiple studies, samples, and tests.
______________________________________________________________________________
V.O. Key Award
2021 V.O. Key Award is presented to the authors of the Best Book on Southern Politics published in 2019:
Republican Party Politics and the American South 1865-1968
Boris Heersink, Fordham University
Jeffery A. Jenkins, University of Southern California
“Profs. Boris Heersink and Jeffrey A. Jenkins’ outstanding work Republican Party Politics and the American South 1865-1968 (Cambridge) explores the transformation of the Party of Lincoln into the predominant modern, white conservative political institution. The careful use of case studies of the American South from the end of the Civil War, through the simultaneous repression of the black vote, local organization, and black inclusion in state and national GOP party politics shed light on the politics of the GOP’s ‘phone booth party’ years. They carry us through to the fragmentation of the South in the 1968 election and the resurgence of the GOP as viable alternative to the Democrats. The work is a major contribution to understanding American political development and will need to st on the desk in close reach of all of us who study Southern and American politics.”
Keith Gaddie, The University of Oklahoma
Phil Klinkner, Hamilton College
Mike Fix, Georgia State University
Periloux Peay, Georgia State University
V. O. Key Award Committee
