Awardee | John Marshall, Ph.D. candidate in Government, is a recipient of the Midwest Political Science Association's 2016 Kellogg/Notre Dame Award for Best Paper in Comparative Politics for his paper, "Information acquisition, local media, and electoral Accountability: When do Mexican voters punish Incumbents for high homicide rates?" Marshall will join the faculty of Columbia University in July as Assistant Professor of Political Science. Learn more about his work at his homepage. To read the award commendation...
From the award commendation: "The Marshall paper is very detailed work that examines the impact of violence on voters’ assessments of incumbent politicians in Mexico. The paper demonstrates that salient short-term performance indicators—such as recent local homicides—revealed just before an election can be major determinant of voting in Mexico. This is because voters who have weak priors over a candidate will only acquire information around election time. Thus the level of violence just before an election, and the media coverage of such violence, will decisively affect an incumbent’s electoral prospects. The paper is theoretically well developed and empirically very sophisticated. Marshall convincingly shows that violence and media coverage just prior to elections has a major impact on the electoral prospects of incumbents. The paper not only has implications for Mexican politics in the era of widespread drug war violence, but for elections in other conflict ridden countries as well."