Below are the 2026 awardees of the various ISPP Awards. For more information on the awards, nomination processes, and past winners, please visit the respective pages.

2026 Harold Lasswell Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions

Leonie Huddy, Stony Brook University, USA

The Harold D. Lasswell Award recognises distinguished scientific contributions to the field. It is awarded to scholars whose work has fundamentally shaped political psychology through sustained, influential, and field-defining research.
The committee would like to enthusiastically recommend Professor Leonie Huddy for the Harold D. Lasswell Award. Leonie’s work has been foundational in shaping how we understand identity, emotion, and group dynamics in political life. Over several decades, her scholarship has helped define key research agendas in political psychology and has influenced generations of scholars across disciplines.
What stood out in the committee’s discussion was depth and consistency of her work, as well as its enduring influence. Leonie’s contributions have become part of the intellectual fabric of the field, shaping how we think about political behaviour at a fundamental level. Alongside her scholarship, she has played a central role in the life of ISPP — contributing to its intellectual community, supporting colleagues, and helping build initiatives that continue to sustain the field.
Taken together, her scientific contributions and her role in shaping the field make her an outstanding and deeply deserving recipient of the Lasswell Award.

---

2026 Nevitt Sanford Award for Outstanding Professional Contributions to Political Psychology

Deniz Ülke Kaynak, Uskudar University, Türkiye

---

2026 David O. Sears Book Award

Antoine J. Banks, University of Maryland, US For The Anger Rule

The Anger Rule makes a significant contribution to political psychology by elaborating basic theories about the behavioral consequences of emotion. Using a multi-methods approach, including national surveys and the careful analysis of thousands of candidate speeches, Banks and White investigate the hypothesis that not all politicians have the same tools at their disposal for mobilizing their base. Black politicians simply cannot display intense anger in the hopes that their own constituents — let alone swing voters who might otherwise support them — will be successfully driven to the polls as a result. This racial disparity in the availability of a powerful campaign tool, namely the strategic mobilization of anger, has important consequences even beyond elections. It also means the fight against social injustice must be taken up by members of the majority if it is to be successful, insofar as righteous anger against that injustice will backfire when expressed by the people most often victimized. The book builds on the work of Davin Phoenix, who demonstrated the failure of Black anger to mobilize or persuade undecided voters in carefully designed experiments. Banks and White have now shown that this insight indeed has very broad consequences for American politics. It is a beautifully written book, and a must-read for students of political behavior and political psychology

---

2026 Juliette and Alexander L. George Outstanding Political Psychology Book Award

Elizabeth Suhay, American University, USA For Debating the American Dream

Elizabeth Suhay’s Debating the American Dream offers a compelling and empirically well grounded re-interpretation of one of the central pillars of American political culture: the belief that hard work leads invariably to success. Drawing on decades of survey data, original datasets, and historical analysis, the book demonstrates that public beliefs about inequality and opportunity are not merely reflections of economic realities but are deeply structured by partisan politics and ideology.  The book bridges political psychology, political economy, and public opinion research, offering a theoretically coherent and empirically rich account of how interpretations of inequality become polarized along partisan lines. The book advances a fundamentally important insight for political psychology: that system-justifying belief systems about fairness, meritocracy, and inequality are actively shaped by partisanship and ideology. This is particularly timely in an era of deep political divisions. Debating the American Dream significantly deepens our understanding of how democratic publics interpret “hard” social reality such as economic disparities. Its combination of methodological rigor, timeliness, theoretical reasoning, and real-world relevance makes it a deserving recipient of this award. It is a great book to read, and highly recommended, as an important contribution to the study of political psychology and ideological polarization.

---

2026 Jim Sidanius Early Career Award

Boaz Hameiri, Tel Aviv University, Israel

Dr. Boaz Hameiri is recognized for his exceptional contributions to understanding the psychological processes that sustain intergroup conflict and for developing innovative interventions to promote reconciliation. Despite being at an early stage of his career, Dr. Hameiri has produced an extraordinary body of scholarship, including more than sixty publications in leading journals and thousands of citations, alongside major competitive research funding. His work on psychological barriers to peace and on interventions such as paradoxical thinking has provided important insights into how deeply entrenched beliefs and narratives can be transformed to increase openness to conflict resolution. This research has been widely recognized within and beyond academia, including publications in leading journals and substantial international media attention. Dr. Hameiri’s scholarship combines theoretical ambition, methodological rigor, and real-world relevance, advancing the political psychological understanding of hierarchy, conflict, and reconciliation.

Özden Melis Uluğ, University of Sussex, England

Dr. Özden Melis Uluğ is honored for her influential research on collective action, intergroup solidarity, and social change in contexts of conflict and repression. Since receiving her PhD in 2016, she has developed an impressive and internationally recognized research program examining how emotions, conflict narratives, and social identities shape protest and political mobilization. Her work has produced important theoretical advances, including the Integrated Contact–Collective Action Model and the Collective Action Recursive Empowerment (CARE) Model, which explain how social relationships and small-scale acts of protest can evolve into broader collective mobilization. Using qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method approaches, Dr. Uluğ studies collective action across diverse political contexts, broadening political psychology beyond Western democratic settings. Beyond her research, she has also made important contributions to the field through leadership and community-building initiatives, including founding the Collective Action Network.

---

2026 John L. Sullivan Mentorship Award

Anna Kende, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest

The John L. Sullivan Mentor Award honours faculty who have demonstrated exceptional commitment to mentorship across all stages of academic development. Inspired by John Sullivan’s legacy, the award recognises mentorship that is intellectually generous, personally supportive, and deeply engaged in bringing scholars into the life of the field — through individual guidance, as well as through building communities, networks, and opportunities that sustain political psychology over time.

Professor Kende’s mentorship is marked by her commitment to building inclusive and internationally connected scholarly communities. She actively supports her students’ development as researchers and members of a wider academic world, creating opportunities and pathways that extend well beyond the local context.

Joanne Miller, University of Delaware, USA

The John L. Sullivan Mentor Award honours faculty who have demonstrated exceptional commitment to mentorship across all stages of academic development. Inspired by John Sullivan’s legacy, the award recognises mentorship that is intellectually generous, personally supportive, and deeply engaged in bringing scholars into the life of the field — through individual guidance, as well as through building communities, networks, and opportunities that sustain political psychology over time.

Professor Miller’s mentorship reflects sustained excellence across all levels of training. She combines intellectual rigor with deep personal investment in her students’ growth, offering guidance that continues long after formal supervision ends. Her mentorship has shaped individual careers and the broader culture of support and collaboration in the field.

---

2026 Jeanne Knutson Award

Thomas Craemer

The Jeanne Knutson Award recognises long-standing and exceptional service to ISPP, honouring those who have contributed to the Society through sustained commitment, leadership, and dedication to its community and mission.

The committee is very pleased to recommend Professor Thomas Craemer for the Jeanne Knutson Award. Thomas has been a steady, generous, and deeply committed presence in ISPP over many years, contributing to the Society in ways that are highly visible and, just as importantly, quietly and consistently sustained behind the scenes.

The committee recognises Thomas’ role as Program Co-chair of the 2020 Annual Meeting, where he helped guide the Society through an exceptionally challenging period with care, flexibility, and a strong sense of responsibility to the community. This was demanding and often unrecognised work, and Thomas carried it out with thoughtfulness, calm judgement, and genuine dedication. Beyond this, he has continued to support ISPP through committee service, including his sustained contribution to the Scholars Under Threat initiative, as well as his wider commitment to equity, diversity, inclusion, and collegiality within the Society.

What stood out most in the committee’s discussion was the spirit of Thomas’s service. He is thoughtful, dependable, generous, and deeply invested in the wellbeing of our Society and its members. His contributions reflect not only commitment, but also a genuine sense of care for the community that ISPP seeks to foster. Thomas represents exactly the kind of sustained, community-oriented contribution that the Knutson Award was created to recognise, and the committee is delighted to honour him in this way.

---

2026 Roberta Sigel Best Conference Paper by Early Career Member Award 1

Jiyoon Kim, Ohio State University, USA – “The Emotional Pulse of Foreign Policy: Status Perceptions, Emotions, and Policy Preferences”

“The Emotional Pulse of Foreign Policy: Status Perceptions, Emotions, and Policy Preferences” is recognized for its innovative contribution to political psychology and international relations. The paper develops a compelling framework showing how citizens’ perceptions of other states’ international status generate distinct collective emotions, such as admiration, contempt, envy, and pity, that shape support for different foreign policy responses. Combining psychological theory with rigorous quantitative and qualitative evidence, Kim demonstrates how emotional processes systematically link status perceptions to policy preferences. By illuminating the emotional foundations of foreign policy attitudes, the article makes an important and original contribution to our understanding of how publics interpret and respond to international politics.

2026 Roberta Sigel Best Conference Paper by Early Career Members Award 2

Efisio Manunta, CLLE, Université de Toulouse, CNRS – “Populism, Economic Distress, Cultural Backlash, and Identity Threat: Integrating Patterns and Testing Cross-National Validity,”

“Populism, Economic Distress, Cultural Backlash, and Identity Threat: Integrating Patterns and Testing Cross-National Validity,” by Manunta and colleagues, is recognized for its theoretical ambition, methodological rigor, and broad comparative reach. The article brings together economic distress and cultural backlash explanations of populism within a unified identity-threat framework, offering an important advance in the study of populist attitudes. Drawing on a large cross-national dataset of more than 9,000 respondents across five countries and employing sophisticated multigroup structural equation modeling, the study demonstrates that these mechanisms operate consistently across diverse contexts. By identifying threats to belonging as a key psychological link between structural grievances and political ideology, the paper provides a powerful and generalizable account of the social-psychological roots of populism.

Salvador Vargas Salfate, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA

Vargas Salfate offers a creative and theoretically integrative analysis of contradictions in research on inequality perceptions, demonstrating how social norms shape ideological expression across contexts. Across multiple preregistered studies conducted in different cultural settings, he combines correlational and experimental designs to test theoretically grounded hypotheses, providing a nuanced account of when and why ideological motives translate into divergent perceptions of inequality. The committee was especially impressed by the project’s conceptual clarity, cross-contextual scope, and its contribution to longstanding debates on inequality beliefs.

---

2026 Markwell Media Award

Florian (“Floo”) Weissmann, Senior Foreign Editor

Florian (“Floo”) Weissman is an Austrian journalist who writes about domestic and international politics, often bringing psychology and political science into his insightful analyses and interviews with researchers and politicians. According to LinkedIn, he is rated as the #3 ranked foreign policy journalist working in Austria. He writes for Tiroler Tageszeitung, a major Austrian daily newspaper, and has covered U.S. and European politics for years. He has also taught a journalist course at the University of Innsbruck, Institute of Political Science for several years. Several of his articles on political psychology, including the origins and concomitants of left-right ideological orientation, are archived (in German and English) here: https://www.tt.com/suche?type=volltext&text=Floo%20Weissmann%20psychology&page=0