WashU Political Science

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WashU Political Science

The Department of Political Science at WashU

The Department of Political Science offers undergraduates the opportunity to study all aspects of politics using cutting-edge technical and theoretical tools. Our courses are animated by longstanding problems related to the use of power, its rightful exercise by governments and individual actors, and the institutions that affect how that power is exercised. Reflecting the breadth of the discipline

, we offer a range of classes, including courses on elections and electoral politics; international political economy; justice and the state; and comparative analyses of political institutions across states.

08/31/2026

Associate Professor Christopher Lucas has received the 2026 Emerging Scholar Award from The Society for Political Methodology.

The award is given each year to honor "a young researcher, within ten years of their degree, who is making notable contributions to the field of political methodology."

The Society for Political Methodology was created to "facilitate and further the academic endeavors of its members, including the production and dissemination of their research, the enhancement and reach of their pedagogy, and the quality and quantity of their service in political methodology, i.e., in research methodology and design, in data collection and measurement, in statistics, and in theoretical and empirical modeling in Political Science."

Read more about the award on our website: https://polisci.washu.edu/news/christopher-lucas-receives-emerging-scholar-award-society-political-methodology

08/21/2026

The American Political Science Association (APSA) recently announced their 2026 individual section awards, and multiple WashU Political Science faculty members were named award recipients.

According to the APSA website, these awards were created "In an effort to bring attention to exceptional scholarship...Currently there are more than 100 such awards honoring dissertations, papers, articles, books and career achievement."

You can view the full list of WashU PoliSci award winners on our website: https://polisci.washu.edu/news/washu-political-science-faculty-receive-multiple-section-awards-apsa

08/20/2026

PhD candidate Zhaozhi Li has been selected as a 2026 Ruth B. Mandel Dissertation Research Award recipient by the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics. Li is one of four scholars selected nationally for the 2026 award.

The $2,000 award supports dissertation research on women, gender, and U.S. politics. Li's dissertation, "How Masculinity Shapes Political Attitudes," examines how migration-related status loss and masculinity shape political attitudes among immigrant men. Their work draws on qualitative interviews, survey experiments, and computational tools to analyze political text and media at different scales.

Read more about Li and the award on our website: https://polisci.washu.edu/news/phd-candidate-zhaozhi-li-receives-2026-ruth-b-mandel-dissertation-research-award

08/13/2026

Assistant Professor Michael Strawbridge was interviewed recently by The St. Louis Post Dispatch about the August 4th Missouri Primary Election. The interview focused on the St. Louis County Executives race for the Democratic nomination between State Sen. Brian Williams, State Sen. Angela Mosley, and County Assessor Jake Zimmerman.

Read the full article on the St. Louis Post Dispatch: https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/government-politics/article_6c4cf61a-c5a9-4028-b0a1-661bc8a6bb1c.html

08/12/2026

Professor Betsy Sinclair, Chair of Political Science and Thomas F. Eagleton Professor of Public Affairs and Politics, has published a new article in the journal, Royal Society Open Science.

The article, titled, "Towards scalable AI-assisted pre-bunking of election misinformation: evidence from a pre-registered US panel experiment," Sinclair and her co-authors present their research on "a scalable artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted framework for rapidly generating ‘pre-bunking’ articles against election misinformation." The team finds that "large language model (LLM)-generated pre-bunking significantly reduced belief in election rumours (effects persisting, though attenuated, one week later) and modestly offset declines in confidence in national election administration, with no evidence of partisan backlash."

Read more about the article and research on our website: https://polisci.washu.edu/news/betsy-sinclair-publishes-new-article-ai-and-misinformation-royal-society-open-science

08/10/2026

Assistant Professor Elaine Yao has received the Best Article by a Non-Tenure Scholar Award from the Formal Theory section of the American Political Science Association (APSA).

Yao's article, titled, “Brook No Compromise: How to Negotiate a United Front," was published in the journal, American Journal of Political Science. The article examines negotiations in factional conflict, and utilizes a dynamic bargaining model to explore how the threat and usage of hardball tactics impact coordination in negotiations.

Read more about the article and the award on our website: https://polisci.washu.edu/news/elaine-yao-receives-best-article-non-tenure-track-scholar-award-formal-theory-section-apsa

08/05/2026

Assistant Professor, Xiaoyan (Christy) Qiu, has received the Outstanding Article Award from the International History and Politics section of the American Political Science Association (APSA).

Qiu's article, titled, "Endogenous Colonial Borders: Precolonial States and Geography in the Partition of Africa," examines the "conventional wisdom that Africa’s international borders were drawn arbitrarily," and uses information from European treaties with African leaders, bodies of water, and other data sets to revise that "conventional wisdom." Qiu co-wrote the article with Jack Paine (Emory University) and Joan Ricart-Huguet (Loyola University - Maryland). The article was published in the journal, American Political Science Review.

Read more about the article and the award on our website: https://polisci.washu.edu/news/xiaoyan-qui-receives-outstanding-article-award-international-history-and-politics-section-apsa

08/04/2026

Assistant Professor Michael Strawbridge has been award the Best Paper Award from the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics section of the American Political Science Association (APSA) for his paper, “This Is How We Do: African American Culture, Political Learning, and Black Democratic Partisanship.”

Strawbridge's paper focuses on why Black Americans have maintained such strong support for the Democratic Party across generations. To explain this trend, Strawbridge developed a new theory and measure which captured how Black Americans develop their political identities through everyday experiences with Black social and cultural institutions.

Read more about the award on our website: https://buff.ly/Fb61HDV

08/03/2026

PhD candidate, Alex Avery, has been selected as an American Doctoral Fellow with the American Association of University Women (AAUW). Avery is one of approximately 126 scholars selected from across the country.

The AAUW's flagship initiative, the American Doctoral Fellowship program is meant to "offset scholars’ expenses during one year of their doctoral program and deepens AAUW’s impact by accelerating diversity, equity, and inclusion in academia."

Read more about the award and Avery's research on our website: https://buff.ly/UBmcGUz

07/27/2026

Assistant Professor Ophelia Vedder has received the Kenneth Sherrill Dissertation Prize from the Sexuality and Politics section of the American Political Science Association (APSA) for their dissertation, "Gender Abolition".

According to the Sexuality and Politics Section:

"The section’s Best Dissertation Award is named in honor of political scientist Kenneth Sherrill (Professor Emeritus, Hunter College-CUNY). The award recognizes the best dissertation on sexuality and politics completed and successfully defended in the previous two calendar years. The award is open to all scholarship that falls under the broad rubric of sexuality and politics, including studies concerning the regulation of sexuality, political responses to the regulation of sexuality, the uses of sexuality as a political construct, the intersections of sexuality with gender, race, and class, or LGBT politics and mobilizations."

Read more about the award and Vedder's dissertation on our website: https://polisci.washu.edu/news/ophelia-vedder-receives-kenneth-sherrill-best-dissertation-award

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1 Brookings Drive, MSC 1063-228/207
St. Louis, MO
63130

Telephone

+13149355810

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https://linktr.ee/washupolisci

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