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.
Meiqing Zhang is a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and an incoming postdoctoral fellow in computational social science at Wesleyan Media Project. Her research interests lie in political communication, political attitudes and behavior in the United States and China, and computational social science. Her current research projects examine the evolution of political speech and values in three different information settings, motivated by a general inquiry into how people have become divided. Outside of academic life, she enjoys swimming, poetry, the NBA, text adventures, and winter.
Citation from the Award Committee:
In her poster, “Moralized Social Media in the 2020 Presidential Election,” Meiqing Zhang reports the result of a large-scale computational content analysis to identify the use of moralizing language in Twitter discourse during the 2020 election. Her analysis of over 848 million tweets finds that both Republicans and Democrats used moralizing language to connect the topics of voting by mail and election fraud, thus making the topic more salient in the broader political discourse. We applaud Zhang for her work.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Katherine Haenschen (chair) of Northeastern University, Adriana Alfaro of the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, Fernando Feitosa of McGill University, Erik Hanson of the University of Southern California, Dr. Rachel Schoner of Tulane University.