Steven Moore (PhD, U-M Political Science, 2020), soon off to start a job as Assistant Professor at Wesleyan, just received the award for best paper in political psychology at the 2019 APSA annual meetings.
His paper, "The Road to Hell: Race, Paternalism, and Political Behavior," was the award committee's unanimous choice.
Here's what the committee had to say:
"In this path-breaking new paper, Steven Moore argues that there is an overlooked but powerful disposition in American racial politics – racialized paternalism. Racialized paternalism is not motivated by animus but rather by a desire to improve the well-being of an outgroup coupled with the idea that the group cannot help themselves. Paternalists endorse policies that restrict the agency of outgroups in the hope of helping the group overcome perceived deficiencies. Moore tests the impact of this disposition on support for paternalistic and racialized policies, such as state takeovers of local school boards. The committee chose this paper for its novel theoretical contribution to the literature on racial and ethnic politics that is rigorously tested with data from the American National Election Studies and an original pre-registered experiment."
