2024 Ruth B. Mandel Awardees Expand Our Thinking on Women in Politics

The Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, is pleased to announce the 2024 recipients of our Ruth B. Mandel Dissertation Research Awards. These four award winners, the second cohort of Mandel awardees, are doing critical work that builds on the women and politics field and explores new areas of inquiry that deepen our understanding of women’s role in American politics.

Yazmin Gomez (Rutgers University–New Brunswick)

Not one in front of the other: A Genealogy of Latina Organizing in Milwaukee’s South Side, 1950-1987

Using oral histories and activist publications, this dissertation chronicles the growing consciousness and activism of Milwaukee Latinas from 1950 to 1987 to give insights into the histories of social movements, feminism, and Latinos in the US.

Samantha Koprowski (Rutgers University–New Brunswick)

Money Talks: The Race-Gendered Dimensions of Voters' Campaign Finance Attitudes and its Impact on Campaign Strategy

This project investigates if the source and amount of campaign contributions signals (non)conformity to race-gendered stereotypes that may harm the public’s support for and evaluations of a woman candidate. Specifically, are women evaluated less favorably by the public for receiving campaign funds from “corrupt” sources, and how do these evaluations impact their financial campaign strategy?

Kaleigh Ruiz (Vanderbilt University)

Gender Differentials in Judicial Decision Making 

This research seeks to expound upon previous research suggesting that women on the bench may be capable of changing the way their colleagues think and rule by analyzing the impact of gender at all stages in the judicial process, theorizing that women judges will be, on the whole, more deliberative than men in their approach to judging.

Asha Venugopalan (Stony Brook University)

‘Joan of America’: How Republican Women Convey Their Partisan Credibility

Recent cohorts of female Republican politicians have used aggressive and ideologically extreme language while deploying the use of masculine tropes. Drawing on social identity theory and the gender trait literature, this research proposes the concept of partisan credibility to argue that Republican women do not fit the prototypical image of their party's leadership and use aggressive rhetoric to compensate for partisan credibility disadvantage.

The Ruth B. Mandel Dissertation Research Awards were established in honor of our founding director, Ruth B. Mandel, whose leadership was critical in building CAWP into a national center with multi-faceted research, education, public service, and information programs, helping to define and build the field. The Mandel Awards support dissertation research on women, gender, and U.S. politics and are $2,000 each in value.

Learn more about the Ruth B. Mandel Dissertation Research Awards here, the 2024 recipients here, and the remarkable life of Ruth Mandel here.