WashU Political Science

Lukas Alexander, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science and Weidenbaum Center Graduate Research Affiliate, has published his article, ‘The Punitive Dimension of Presidential Particularism,’ in the American Political Science Review, the discipline’s leading journal.

In the article, Alexander examines whether presidents use administrative power to impose costs on politically oppositional constituencies, showing that DOGE contract cuts were disproportionately concentrated in counties that provided weaker electoral support for President Trump.

Read his article and research on our department site: https://buff.ly/KLUOqY0

Professor Jacob Montgomery was recently interviewed by mid-Missouri NPR station, KBIA, about AI use in local government.

The article is focused on a recent decision by the board of aldermen of Centralia, MO, to regulate use of AI by city employees. The main regulation is that employees must be able "to verify the accuracy of any generated content," and can face disciplinary action or be fired if they violate uses of generative AI set by their supervisors.

Montgomery discusses the use of AI in general by government entities:

“You would not want it to write messages out to citizens in emergency situations where humans haven’t had a chance to review the content,” Montgomery said. “I think small governments are also disadvantaged because creating customized AI infrastructure that, for instance, runs on local compute infrastructure so that data isn’t transferred to third parties can be quite expensive and require specialized staff that they may not have."

Read the full article and Montgomery's comments on the KBIA website: https://buff.ly/9MAsnQM

Hwayong Shin, Weidenbaum Center Post-Doctoral Fellow in Survey Research, has published the first wave of the Weidenbaum Center Survey Reports — a look into the issues Americans believe are shaping politics and society today. The reports provide accessible, data-driven insights into American public opinion.

Read about the reports on our website: https://polisci.washu.edu/news/post-doc-hwayong-shin-publishes-weidenbaum-center-survey-reports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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