News
Outstanding Paper Award
April 16, 2025
Every year the department holds a competition to choose an outstanding student paper written for a political science course. The Student Awards committee is pleased to announce that this year’s winner is Nancy Boyd, who wrote “Abortion on the Ballot: Analysis of Abortion Referenda in the 2022 and 2024 Elections” for Professor Walker’s PLS 495 Capstone course.
Nancy writes, “Through analyzing historically Republican, Democratic, and swing states and drawing upon public opinion, electoral outcomes, and voter turnout rates, this paper finds that abortion-related referenda do not affect voter motivation. However, the referenda tend to offer success for Democrats in races where Republicans were suspected to win, resulting in anomalous races.”
We congratulate Nancy on her excellent work.