Political Communication Division

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Interest Group Awards 2025

Listed here are awards given by the Interest Group to its members. Interests Groups are smaller communities within NCA’s large membership that provide a range of resources including networking opportunities, Annual Convention programming, leadership opportunities, awards, and specialized information dissemination channels, among others.

Read more about this Interest Group.

Roderick P. Hart Outstanding Book Award

Year	Award Winner
2025	Luke Winslow, “Oligarchy in America: Power, Justice, and the Rule of the Few”
2024	Allison M. Prasch, The World Is Our Stage: The Global Rhetorical Presidency and the Cold War
2023	Emily Van Duyn, Democracy Lives in Darkness: How and Why People Keep Their Politics a Secret, published by Oxford University Press in 2021
	Melissa Aronczyk & Maria I. Espinoza, A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of American Environmentalism, published by Oxford University Press in 2021
2022	Stephen J. Heidt, Resowing the Seeds of War: Presidential Peace Rhetoric since 1945, published by Michigan State University Press in 2021
	Joshua M. Scacco & Kevin Coe, The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times, published by Oxford University Press in 2021
	Sarah Sobieraj, Credible Threat: Attacks Against Women Online and the Future of Democracy, published by Oxford University Press in 2020
	(Honorable Mention) Michael McDevitt, Where Ideas Go to Die: The Fate of Intellect in American Journalism, published by Oxford University Press in 2020.
2021	Dannagal G. Young, Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States (2019)
2020	Ashley Hinck, Politics for the Love of Fandom: Fan-Based Citizenship in a Digital World (LSU Press, 2019)
2019	Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Cyber-War: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President – What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know (Oxford University Press, 2018)
2019	Sharon E. Jarvis and Soo-Hye Han, Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t: How Journalists Sideline Electoral Participation (Without Even Knowing It) (Penn State University Press, 2018)
2018	Joel Penney, The Citizen Marketer: Promoting Political Opinion in the Social Media Age (Oxford University Press, 2017)
2017	Marwan M. Kraidy (2017). The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World. (Harvard University Press, 2016)
2016	Michael Lee (2014). Creating Conservatism: Postwar Words that Made an American Movement. Michigan State University Press.
2015	Jennifer Stromer-Galley (2014). Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age. New York: Oxford University Press.
2014	Mary Stuckey (2013). The Good Neighbor: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Rhetoric of American Power. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
2013	Brian Kaylor (2012). Presidential Campaign Rhetoric in an Age of Confessional Politics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
2012	Kate Kensi, Bruce W. Hardy, & Kathleen H. Jamieson (2010). The Obama Victory: How Media, Money, and Message Shaped the 2008 Election. Oxford University Press.
2011	Marwan M. Kraidy (2010). Reality television and Arab politics: Contention in public life. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
2010	Geoffrey Baym (2009). From Cronkite to Colbert: The evolution of broadcast news. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
2009	David Domke & Kevin Coe (2007). The God strategy: How religion became a political weapon in America. New York: Oxford University Press.
2008	Carol K. Winkler (2006). In the name of terrorism: Presidents on political violence in the post-world war II era. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
2007	Sharon E. Jarvis (2005). The talk of the party: Political labels, symbolic capital and American life. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Michael Pfau Outstanding Article Award

Year	Award Winner
2025	Sangwon Lee, Edson C. Tandoc, Jr., & Trevor Diehl, “Uninformed and Misinformed: Advancing a Theoretical Model for Social Media News Use and Political Knowledge”
2024	Hillary Shulman, Matthew Sweitzer, Olivia Bullock, Jason Coronel, Robert Bond, and Shannon Poulsen, “Predicting Vote Choice and Election Outcomes from Ballot Wording: The Role of Processing Fluency in Low Information Direct Democracy Elections”
2023	Noor Ghazal Aswad, “Radical Rhetoric: Toward a Telos of Solidarity, Rhetoric and Public Affairs,” published in Rhetoric & Public Affairs in 2021
2022	Allison M. Prasch, “The Rise of the Global Rhetorical Presidency,” published in Presidential Studies Quarterly in 2021
2021	Hsuan-Ting Chen, Lei Guo, and Chris Chao Su,”Network Agenda Setting, Partisan Selective Exposure, and Opinion Repertoire: The Effects of Pro- and Counter-Attitudinal Media in Hong Kong”
2020	Robert C. Rowland, “The populist and nationalist roots of Trump’s rhetoric” Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 22(3), 343-388
2019	Ashley Muddiman and Natalie Jomini Stroud, “News Values, Cognitive Biases, and Partisan Incivility in Comment Sections” Journal of Communication, 67(4), 586-609
2018	Benjamin R. Warner & Astrid Villamil, “A Test of Imagined Contact as a Means to Improve Cross-Pratisan Feelings and Reduce Attribution of Malevolence and Acceptance of Political Violence” Communication Monographs, 84:4, 447-465
	Michael J. Lee, “Us, Them, and the War on Terror: Reassessing George W. Bush’s Rhetorical Legacy” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 14:1, 3-30
2017	Josh Scacco and Kevin Coe, “The Ubiquitous Presidency: Toward a New paradigm for Studying Presidential Communication” International Journal of Communication
2016	Michael Serazio (2014). The New Media Designs of Political Consultants: Campaign Production in a Fragmented Era. Journal of Communication, 64 (4), 743-763.
2015	Michael L. Butterworth (2014). Nate Silver and Campaign 2012: Sport, the Statistical Frame, and the Rhetoric of Electoral Forecasting. Journal of Communication 64, 895-914.
2014	Mitchell S. McKinney and Benjamin R. Warner, “Do presidential debates matter? Examining a decade of campaign debate effects.” Argumentation and Advocacy 49, 238-258.
2013	Kevin Coe & Anthony Schmidt (2012). America in Black and White: Locating Race in the Modern Presidency, 1933-2011. Journal of Communication 62, 609-627.
2012	Karen V. Anderson (2011). “Rhymes with Blunt”: Pornification and U.S. Political Culture. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 14(2), 327-368.
2011	Stroud, N. J. (2010). Polarization and partisan selective exposure. Journal of Communication 60(3), 556-576.
2010	Anderson, F. D., King, A., & McClure, K. (2009). Kenneth Burke’s dramatic form criticism. In J. A. Kuypers (Ed.), Rhetorical Criticism: Perspectives in Action (pp. 143-163). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
2009	Rowland, R., & Jones, J. (2007). Recasting the American dream and American politics: Barack Obama’s keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Quarterly Journal of Speech 93, 425-448.
2008	Coe, K., & Domke, D. (2006). Petitioners or prophets? Presidential discourse, God, and the ascendancy of religious conservatives. Journal of Communication 56, 309-330.
2007	Mitchell, G. R. (2006). Team B intelligence coups. Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, 144-173.

Lynda Lee Kaid Outstanding Dissertation Award

Year	Award Winner
2025	Qin Li, “In People We Trust: How Trust and Network Closure Impact Factual Beliefs and Misinformation Sharing”
2024	Ekaterina Romanova, “Media, Identity, and Politics: The Case of Russian Diasporas in the U.S.”
2023	María Celeste Wagner, “Responding to Media Coverage of Gender-Based Violence in Argentina and the United States: A Mixed Methods Study of the Intersecting Roles of Gender, Class, and Racialized Ethnicity Among General and Activist Publics”
2022	Yujin Kim, “How Language Use on Facebook Drives Affective Polarization”
2021	Jessica R. Collier, “Exposure to Misinformation on Social Media: The Role of Contextual Factors Beyond Motivated Reasoning.”
2020	Emily Elizabeth Van Duyn, “Networked Silence: Political Dissent in a Digital Era”
2019	Kaiping Chen,” When People’s Voices Matter: Examining Mini-Public Deliberation and Digital Crowdsourcing with Machine Learning Tools”
2018	Shannon C. McGregor, “Social (Media) Construction of Public Opinion by Political Elites”
2017	Michael Kearney, “A Network-Based Approach to Estimating Partisanship and Analyzing Change in Polarization During the 2016 General Election”
2016	Josh Scacco, “Presidential Prediction: The Strategic Construction and Influence of Expectation Frames”
2015	Ashely Hinck, “Fan-Based Performances of Citizenship: Fandom, Public Engagement, and Politics”
2014	Ashley Muddiman, “The instability of incivility: How news frames and citizen perceptions shape conflict in American politics”
2013	Justin Reedy, “Political discussion and deliberative democracy in immigrant communities”
2012	Timothy Barney, “(Re)Placing America: Cold War Mapping and the Mediation of International Space”
2011	Mary D. Brinson, “Muslims in the media: Intercultural consequences of an Islamaphobic media system”
2010	Leslie A. Rill, “Information, pleasure, and persuasion: How motivations function in talking politics”
2009	Cindy Koenig Richards, “The awakening: Rhetoric and the rise of new women in the new Northwest, 1868 – 1912”
2007	Natalie Stroud, “Selective Exposure to Partisan Information”

Bruce E. Gronbeck Political Communication Research Award

Year	Award Winner
2016	Ned O’Gorman

Top Paper Award

Year	Award Winner
2025	Gregory Griffin, “Only You Can Prevent the Apocalypse: Donald Trump, American Carnage, and Egotism at the Brink”
2024	Bridget Barrett, Teresa Tackett, and Andrea Lorenz, “Pistols and Pearls: A Textual Analysis of Woman vs. Woman 2022 Gubernatorial Political Advertisements”
	Yixiao Sun and Zhihao Ma, “Authoritarians in Response to Societal Crises: Reciprocal Dynamics of Right-Wing Authoritarianism, COVID-19 Fear and Prevention Belief”
	Ryan Neville-Shepard and Meredith Neville-Shepard, “Conspiracy Theatre of the Absurd: “Birds Aren’t Real” as Parodic Hypermimesis”
	Je Hoon Chae and David Tewksbury, “Implications of Automated Fact-Checking for Democratic Processes”
2023	Chris S. Earle, “Postracial Presumptions: The Supreme Court’s Undoing of the Voting Rights Act through Racial Ignorance”
2022	Robert Hinck, Edward A. Hinck, & Shelly Schaefer Hinck, “Gender, Politeness, and the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary Debates.”
2021	Stewart M. Coles, “Evaluating the Political Relevance of Media Content: Conceptualization and Consequences.”
2020	Emily Elizabeth Van Duyn, “Politics and Partnerships: Navigating Political Conflict in Cross-Cutting Romantic Relationships”
	Jacob William Justice, “Conspiracy Theory at the Political Crossroads: Trump Campaign Rallies and the Rhetoric of Conspiracy Theory”
	Camille Saucier, Nathan Walter, and Stephanie Edgerly, “When and Why Do People Fact-Check Partisan Information”
	Dustin Carnahan, Daniel E. Bergan, Suhwoo Ahn, Ezgi Ulusoy, and Rachel Barry, “The Beliefs of Others: Assessing the Potential of Partisan In-Group Norms as a Strategy toward Correcting Misperceptions”
2019	Josh Guitar, “The Snowden Ideograph: How the State Survived Snowden’s Attempt to Save Democracy,”, Christopher Newport University
2018	Beth Bollinger, Kevin J Calderwood, & Rico Neumann, “From Nixon to Trump: Analyzing Presidential Discourse Discussing Violence Against Women”
2017	Ignacio Moreno and Karrin Anderson, “Political Pornification Gone Global: Teresa Rodriguez as a Fungible Object in the 2015 Spanish Regional Elections”

Top Student Paper Award

Year	Award Winner
2025	Wonjeong Jo and Magdalena Wojcieszak, “Rejection of Cross-cutting News Depends on News Sources, Content, and Cultural Contexts: Evidence from Online Trace Data”
2024	Colin Cameron, “Assault Weapons Versus Assault on Democracy: A Burkean Analysis of the Tennessee Three Expulsion”
	Noureddin Yeilaghi and Ali Ghanbarian, “Beyond the Rhetoric: Unveiling Tucker Carlson’s Communication Strategy Amidst the Russia’s War on Ukraine”
	Priyanka Kundu, “Platform Affective Populism (PAP): A Study on Bangladeshi Political Parties’ Use of Populism and Affective Politics in Pre-Election Facebook Campaign”
	Akansha Sirohi and Mor Yachin, “Can Emotions Prompt Opinion Sharing? Testing the Spiral of Silence in the Case of Roe v. Wade”
2023	Logan Sean Spence, “Conspiratorial Apocalyptic Sublime: Critical Race Theory as the Sublime Object of Ideology”
2022	Abby QIN, “Staying Tuned for Censored Information Sources? A media habit approach to immigrants’ information practices.”
2021	Kristina M. Lee, “Playing Devil’s Advocate: The Satanic Temple’s Strategic Utilization of Blasphemy as a Form of Uncivil Obedience.”
2020	Joseph Lawrence Flores,“The Memes to the End: Affective Labor, (Fetishistic) Political Participation, and Propaganda on behalf of a Trump National Imaginary”
	Chelsea P. Butkowski and Samuel Wilson, “Can’t, Won’t, Don’t Vote: Networked Non-Voter Narratives During the 2016 Election”
	Mark Schmutzler, “Untying the Binds of Congress: The Competing Narratives and Binding of Congressional Speakers”
	Samuel T. Allen, “Trump’s (Non)Presidential Rhetoric and the Trump Rhetorical Presidency”
2019	Ethan Morrow, Jihye Park, and Iuliia Alieva, “Crossing Realms: The Effect of Facebook Activity on Offline Political Engagement”
2018	Wm. Bryan Paul, “The Political Hero on Display: Rethinking the American Monomyth in Madam Secretary”
2017	Lauren Fine, “The Difference of Four Years: How Students’ Political Views Change During College”

Outstanding Service to the Division

Year	Award Winner
2024	Kelly Winfrey
2023	Ashley R. Muddiman
2022	Colene Lind
2021	Sumana Chattopadhyay
2020	Benjamin R. Warner
2019	Kevin Coe
2018	Rebekah Watson Gaidis
2017	Kristy Horn Sheeler

Top Paper Panel Recipients

Year	Award Winner
2021	Christina Marie Henry & William Eveland, Jr.”Express Yourself? Political Conversation, Emotion Regulation, and the Expression of Political Emotions”
	Freddie J. Jennings & Benjamin Warner”Partisan Cues, Anger, and Attitude Formation: Three Experiments on Partisan Motivated Reasoning”
	Calvin R. Coker & Joel Lansing Reed”Express Yourself?”This is a Patriotism Check: Political Economy, Corruption, and Duty to America in the 2020 Primary Debates”
2017	Soumia Bardhan, “Contextualizing Democratic Ideals into Islamic Idiom? The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Counterpublic Dynamis in Ikhwanweb”
	Alison Novak, “Millenial Engagement Myth-Busing: Active Disengagement and the Future of Digital Politics”
	Mitchell McKinney, Fred Jennings, Calvin Coker, and Benjamin Warner, “Tweeting Presedential Primary Debates: Debate Processing through Motivated Twitter Instruction”

Top Student Paper Panel Recipients

Year	Award Winner
2021	Dakota Park-Ozee”‘The Man Who Has Money is King’: Discursive Constructions of Affluent Domination of U.S. Politics in Letters-to-the-Editor, 1948-2016″
	Ryan Bince “Polarizing the Populi: An Agonistic Approach to Populist Discourse”
	Sebastiaan HMH Gorissen”The Deplatforming of Donald Trump: The First Amendment and Content Moderation to Curb Anti-American Political Dissent on Social Media”
2017	Loretta Rowley, “Domesticating International Responsibilities: U.S. Gubernatorial Resistance to Obama’s Syrian Refugee Resettlement Plan”
	Sohyun Choi, “Hope and Its Place in Politics”
	Rico Neumann and Devon Geary, “Reaching Muslims from the Bully Pulpit: Analyzing Presidential Discourse on Islam and Muslims from FDR to Obama”