Professors Filindra and Kaplan win National Award
Congratulations to Professors Alexandra Filindra and Noah Kaplan for receiving the Lucius Barker Award, to be presented at the MPSA--Great work, Alexandra and Noah!
On behalf of the Midwest Political Science Association’s Lucius Barker Award committee, including Andra Gillespie, Emory University (chair), Andrew Aoki, Augsburg College, and Karen Kaufmann, UCLA, I am happy to inform you that your paper, “Racial Resentment and Whites’ Gun Policy Preferences in Contemporary America” presented at the MPSA conference in April2015, has been chosen to receive the Lucius Barker Award for the best paper presented at the annual meeting on a topic investigating race or ethnicity and politics honoring the spirit and work of Professor Barker.
The committee has the following to say about the paper:
The committee thought all of the nominated papers were good. However, this paperwas especially notable. In their paper, Drs. Filindra and Kaplan test the relationship between priming, racial resentment and support for gun control. Using an experimental protocol and implicit attitude testing, they find that racially resentful whites who are exposed to implicit primes of black faces are more likely to oppose gun control. This in and of itself is notable and timely. However, Drs. Filindra and Kaplan supplement the experimental data with an excellent historical analysis about the origins of resistance to gun control measures and the connection between opposition to civil rights and opposition to gun control. It was this methodological pluralism that made the paper stand out from its peers. As one of the committee members described it, “this paper is running on all cylinders.”