Graduate Student 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
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”
