The APSA Best Poster Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best poster presented by a graduate student or early career scholar at the previous APSA Annual Meeting.
Citation from the Award Committee:
The committee reviewed over 160 i-posters presented at the 2025 meeting and unanimously approved the top award to go to A. P. Turek, a PhD candidate of UCLA, for the poster entitled “Underdevelopment and Inequality: Income Distributions and Coups in the Long Run” submitted to Division 6 of Political Economy.
The Committee finds the poster to address a novel topic and intervention, with the smart research design complemented by aesthetically well-presented findings. This research adds to the already large literature in conflict studies that connects economic inequality, elite politics, and regime instability. Using coup prediction in Latin America to help elucidate these dynamics was a compelling choice. The harrowing findings help enunciate the impacts of income inequality, including coups, and the ways societies come together around collective problems. We are eager to see the next steps in this research agenda. We believe the new dataset could be a very exciting public good for scholars in multiple fields, too.
A.P. Turek is a graduate student in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. His work bridges comparative politics, political economy, and civil-military relations. A.P.’s research aims to address how inequality and redistribution influence democracies and autocracies through longitudinal historical work. His current work, presented at the 2026 Western Political Science Conference, addresses polarization and preferences for redistribution in European democracies. A.P. is also a visiting scholar at the Socio-Economic Panel of Germany in Berlin, Germany.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Pei-te Lien (Chair) of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Stella Rouse of Arizona State University, Kanisha Bond of Binghamton University, Matthew Platt of Morehouse College, and Marcus Board Jr. of Howard University