Samuel Eldersveld Career Achievement Award
Recognizes a scholar whose lifetime professional work has made an outstanding contribution to the field.
Award Winner: Richard Katz, Johns Hopkins University
Committee: Julia Azari (chair), Richard Johnston, Robin Kolodny
Emerging Scholar Award
Given to a scholar early in their career who has not yet received tenure and whose career to date demonstrates unusual promise.
Award winner: Lucia Motolinia, Washington University in St. Louis
Committee: Sarah Anzia (chair), David Miller, Zeynep Somer-Topcu
Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award
Recognizes a book published in the last two calendar years that made an outstanding contribution to research and scholarship on political organizations and parties.
Award Winner: Mathias Poertner, London School of Economics and Political Science
Committee: Noam Lupu (chair), Hans Noel, Sarah Wiliarty
Jack Walker Best Article Award
Recognizes an article published in the last two calendar years that makes an outstanding contribution to research and scholarship on political organizations and parties.
Award winners: Tanushree Goyal, Princeton University and Cameron Sells, Independent Researcher
Committee: Boris Heersink (chair), Jesse Crosson, Mattias Dilling, Maraam Dwidar, Jae-Hee Jung
POP Best Paper Award
Recognizes the best paper delivered on a Political Organizations and Parties-sponsored panel at the preceding APSA annual meeting.
Award winner: Gabriel Foy-Sutherland, University of Chicago
Committee: Caitlin Andrews-Lee (chair), Andrea Aldrich, Sergio Ascencio
Virginia Gray Graduate Student Research Award
This award honors distinguished scholar of American politics and mentor of many graduate students, Dr. Virginia Gray, Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The award is for graduate student members of the Political Organizations and Parties who are presenting research at the American Political Science Association Annual Conference.
Ash V. Elswick (They/Them/Theirs) is a Trans, First-Generation Dual-Ph.D. student in Political Science and Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. Previously, they obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy with minors in Music, LGBTQ+ Studies, and Women & Gender Studies from West Virginia University. During their undergrad, Ash helped start a non-profit located in Michigan focusing on mental health awareness and worked as a community organizer in another non-profit located in West Virginia. Here, they focused on harm reduction, houselessness, and abortion rights, aiding in writing municipal policy to help people achieve better accessibility for renting, and separately, achieve easier access to maternal and abortion care. These experiences working in their Appalachian community led to their current research interests. Ash’s research agenda focuses on the intersections of economic inequality, political behavior, and marginalized identities, with an emphasis on how impoverished rural communities experience and respond to political alienation. Across their projects, they investigate how social inequalities, along lines of class, gender, and race, affect who participates in politics, how they engage, and which institutions or organizations serve as conduits for their political representation and communication.
Kadir Cihan Duran is a Dual-Title Ph.D. student in Political Science and Social Data Analytics at Penn State University. He holds both a Bachelor and a Master of Arts in Political Science and International Relations from Bogazici University, Turkey. His research interests include authoritarian regimes, social media, and quantitative research methods, with a specific focus on network analysis and natural language processing. His works have been published in the New Media & Society and Politics, Groups, and Identities. His thesis examines how incumbent and opposition actors strategically deploy misinformation on digital platforms. The research investigates the dynamic where pro-incumbent actors, who possess superior resources and control traditional media, infiltrate opposition-dominated online spaces like YouTube to disrupt their mobilization efforts. Using a mix of network analysis and machine learning, he hypothesizes that this infiltration is asymmetric, with incumbents infiltrating opposition spaces more than the reverse, and that these misinformation surges force opposition groups into reactive strategies like debunking false claims. He was awarded the Virginia Gray Graduate Student Research Award for his study on the effects of pre-election coalitions on voter behavior.
Elise Frelin is a PhD Candidate in politics at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK whose research agenda concerns how digital media and tools affect political parties. She writes: “More specifically, I study how parties and candidates form communication strategies across platforms and measure this using different text analysis methods. In my dissertation work, I explore how and why candidates diverge from their parties’ issue communication in manifestos on social media across several recent west European elections. My chapters explore to what extent issues overlap across manifestos and social media, why this takes place on a candidate level, and how candidates frame their party’s manifesto issues. I also have ongoing research projects examining how candidates’ social media campaigning is moderated by structural, partisan, and individual characteristics, as well as how candidates’ social media issue concerns respond to public opinion. Before starting my PhD, I earned a BSc in business and economics from the Stockholm School of Economics and an MSc in comparative politics from University College London.”
Abigail Tetteh is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at Northern Illinois University, specializing in International Relations and Comparative Politics. Her research broadly investigates how African governments navigate the development of cybersecurity policies within a global landscape shaped by competing conceptions of the Internet, particularly those advanced by the United States and China. For her APSA 2025 conference presentation and working paper, Abigail examines the electoral success of minority political parties in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially in Ghana examining how these political parties win seats outside of their traditional regional strongholds. She holds a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Philosophy in Political Science from the University of Ghana, where she also served as a Teaching and Research Assistant. Abigail is enthusiastic about international politics and frequently writes on topics such as digitization, cybersecurity policy, the geopolitical dimensions of internet governance, Ghana’s foreign policy, elections, political parties, and women in politics.
Victor Y. Wu is a J.D./Ph.D. student at Stanford Law School and Stanford Political Science. He graduated as valedictorian from Dartmouth College in 2022 with a triple major in Government, Environmental Studies, and Quantitative Social Science. He uses survey experiments to explore how political parties and elites influence public opinion and political behavior. In a paper recently accepted at Nature Communications, Victor shows that co-partisan elite cues can increase climate mitigation behaviors—like installing solar panels or driving electric vehicles—without increasing belief in climate change, and without provoking a “backfire effect” among Republicans. As another example, his recent paper in Party Politics shows that Americans who want a third party are just as polarized as their non-disaffected counterparts.