Departmental Honors

In the spring semester, juniors who have achieved a GPA of 3.0 or higher in the major and overall are invited to apply to the department for placement in Political Science 400, Senior Thesis. Students who fall below a 3.0 GPA may be granted an exception to apply on a case-by-case basis. Majors who have achieved a GPA of 3.500 or higher in the major and overall may be considered for honors. After the student completes and formally presents the thesis, the political science faculty determine whether to grant honors on graduation.

 

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Past Honors Thesis Projects:

2012

Randi Phillips, “Tocqueville on the Condition of American Labor and Industry and its Contribution Toward Democratic Despotism.”

2013

Kristofer S. Lyon, “Red Batons: Explaining Variation in Police Use of Force at Public Protests in the United States.”

2014

Maya Gold, “Sheep and Scandal.” Maya conducted a survey experiment to test alternative theories of how political partisans respond to scandals within their own party.

2015
 
Walker Davis, “The Call is Coming From Inside the House: The effect of electoral proximity on the quality of third party complaints.”

Zoe Klingmann, “Outside In: The Litigation Strategies of Tent Cities.”
2016
 
Reid Sata, “Online Credit Recovery and Graduation Rates in Oregon Public High Schools.”

2017

Katie Kowal, “Can Information Lead to Voice? A Study of Broken Schools and Public Response.”

Nick LeSage, “WordPress and Chill: Defamation Law’s Chilling Effect in the Digital Age.”

2018

Rafael Swit,  “Representing the Public Will in the Age of Misinformation.”

2019

Benjamin Bardman, “Power and Theory in 1984: The Political Theory of George Orwell.”

Jacob Bell, “Skinning the Cat: Understanding Voter Preferences on Corporate Tax Policy.”

Alaina Haig, “The Relationship Between Christian Religiosity and Public Opinion on Education Spending.”

2020

Celia McDonald, “Is This Seat Taken? The Effect of Gender Quotas on Symbolic Representation.”

2021

Jacob Muscarella, “Partisan Motivated Reasoning, Information Framing, and Attitudes toward Congress.”

2022

Paige Underwood, “Movement or Myth? An Empirical Study of Progressive Prosecution In the United States.”

Alex Webb, “A Concervative Legal Bastion? Federalist Society Judges and the Fourth Amendment.”