Graduate Awards

William P. Hobby Award

William P. Hobby, Jr. is a Rice alumnus who served as Lieutenant Governor of Texas for eighteen years from 1973-1991. Since 1989, Hobby has served as Radoslav A. Tsanoff Professor of Public Affairs at Rice. The William P. Hobby Award is presented for the best political science paper presented at a professional conference by a current Rice graduate student. The paper may be co-authored with other graduate students, but papers co-authored with faculty members are not eligible. Each faculty member may nominate no more than one paper per year for the award.

Previous Hobby Award Winners

2023 - Gonzalo Di Landro, "Party Behavior and the Gender Voting Gap for the Left: The Role of Representation"
2022 - Jared Oestman, "Burden Sharing in UN Peacekeeping Operations: Who Deploys to the Frontlines?"
2021 - Yui Nishimura, "Normative and Strategic Naming and Shaming in the UN Universal Periodic Review"
2020 - Carly Mayes, "A Few Good Women: Gender Stereotypes and Veteran Status in Candidate Evaluation"
2019 - Jessica Edry, "Gender Balance in Legislatures and State Ratification Behavior
2018 - Jessica Edry, “Mastering the Double-Edged Sword: How Low Commitments to Human Rights Treaties Deepen Over Time” & Kaitlin Senk, “Gender and Legislative Effectiveness in the Argentine Chamber of Deputies”
2017 - Andrew Menger, “Measuring the Costs of Voting and their Impact”
2016 - Hiroki Kubo, “Does Intradistrict Polarization Cause Party Polarization in Congress?”
2015 - Naoko Matsumura, “How Do States Behave in an Overlapping Institutional Environment? PTA Negotiations and Compliance with WTO Rulings”
2014 - Carolina Tchintian, “Ballot Design and Intraparty Fragmentation: Electronic Voting in Brazil”
2013 - Matthew Loftis, “Policy Under Pressure: When Coalition Government Collusion Breaks Down”
2012 - Jesse Johnson, “The Cost of Security: Foreign Policy Concessions and Military Alliances”
2011 - Daina Chiba, “International Institutions and the Durations of International Conflict and Post-conflict Peace”


Best Poster Presentation by a First Year Graduate Student

(formerly Best Paper by a First Year Graduate Student)

Each year every first year graduate student completes a research project and presents it at a poster session for the full department at the end of the spring semester. All of the poster presentations are automatically entered into this competition.

2019 - Santiago Lopez Alvarez, “More Bullets, More Doves? The Impact of Violence on Political Behavior: Evidence from Colombia”
2018 - Nicholas Coulombe, “Beyond the Boilerplate: Conflict Management Mechanisms in Nonaggression Pacts”
2017 - Kristin Bryant, “A Silver Bullet? Targeting Aid to Improve Human Rights”
2016 - Frank Plageman, “Immigration, Economics, and the Rise of the Extreme Right”
2015 - Maria Aroca, “Building Subdistrict Constituencies: Local Representation in the Colombian Congress”
2014 - Jonathan Kurt Simmons, “Profiting from Peace: Peacekeeping Operations and the Investments They Attract”
2013 - Andrew Menger, “Expelled and Excluded: Tracing Variation in Participation to Early Experience with Authority”
2012 - Carolina Tchintian, “Splitting the Ballot: a Natural Experiment on Electronic Vote”
2011 - Naoko Matsumura, “Third Party's Influence on Compliance in the Case of the WTO's Dispute Settlement”