On Wednesday, April 2, Pi Sigma Alpha, Macalester’s chapter of the National Political Science Honor Society, held its 19th annual political science conference in the Weyerhaeuser Boardroom.
The conference consisted of four student panels, each featuring three different student presentations discussing relevant political issues, along with the keynote address given by Dr. Ashley Sorensen, a former Macalester guest lecturer and current junior research manager for Gradient Metrics, a data science company.
The Mac Weekly attended three student panels and the keynote address.
The 10:50 a.m. student panel had three student presentations on “U.S. Politics and Policy.” Alexis MonBunay Prathammanon ’25 presented “‘WIC’ked Inequities: Addressing the Barriers to Nutritional Support Programs.” She explained how breastfeeding mothers had different levels of awareness and access to federal economic support and compared and analyzed this through a cost-base analysis.
Riley Hodin ’25 presented his findings from his capstone project “The Law of the Biggest Pump: Legal Consciousness and the Texas Groundwater Dilemma,” in which he examined the legal consciousness of the “rule of capture” which allows landowners to take unlimited water from underneath their property, even if it disrupts the local water supply.
Finally, Rylan Mueller ’25* presented his results from his capstone, “Spending in Vain? The Impact of Spending in the 2016 and 2020 US Presidential Elections.” Mueller used statistical analysis to investigate whether the amount of money spent on a presidential election dictates the outcome. Despite coming up with inconclusive results, Mueller emphasized that the amount of money spent on presidential elections has increased to a dangerous level since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC), which ruled that corporations can invest to an unlimited degree in political campaigns.
“If spending doesn’t matter, we don’t need to be spending this much on elections,” Mueller said.
Afterwards, Sorensen gave her keynote address entitled “Why We Can’t All Just Get Along: What Political Psychology Reveals about Division and How to Fix It,” which applied a psychological perspective to political polarization in American society.
Sorensen began her presentation by stating that around 61 percent of Americans avoid talking about politics with their peers. She explained that Americans fear sharing their true political opinions due to societal pressure to have the “correct” political stance.
Sorensen then described the Social Identity Theory, which states that humans have a natural inclination to identify with others.
“[Identifying with others] serves as a way to protect yourself and your self-esteem from threatening information as well as threatening out-groups,” Sorensen said. “When you’re forced to essentially make quick tasks, it’s easy to rely on this [identifying] information [when] deciding who to trust.”
In the American political realm, this theory plays out by a person identifying with one of the two major political parties. According to Sorensen, this concept of Partisan Identification is the fundamental way that a person encounters politics.
“It’s natural for humans to identify with political parties in the sense it provides for system behavior [ which] evaluates the political world and makes efficient decisions,” Sorensen said.
Sorensen then provided data showing that 90 percent of American voters have partisan allegiances, even those who claim to be independents. After illustrating that an overwhelming majority of Americans favor a particular party, Sorensen presented her research question: “Has polarization gotten out of hand?”
Sorensen explained that political polarization impacts non-political decision-making.
“Research … has shown that partisanship and polarization now affect our perception of events,” Sorensen said. “If you show Democrats and Republicans [the same] video… they’re going to point out different things or have different rationales for a specific action. [Partisanship] determines who we’re attached to and who we’re willing to be friends with.”
Sorensen also cited a study that showed that 33 percent of Democrats and 49 percent of Republicans surveyed would disapprove of their child marrying a person from the other political party.
With all of this data showing the impacts of political polarization, Sorensen presented the findings of the “Social Pressure Index,” a paper she recently contributed to. The researchers gave respondents a list of political statements and asked how many statements with which they agreed. The experiment concluded that there were differences in how respondents felt privately about an issue compared to their public opinion.
“Things like defunding the police…the percent of [Democrats] that privately support that today is 3 percent but public opinion polls would say [that it’s 27 percent],” Sorensen said. “Similarly, on the Republican side, we can see that [amongst] Republicans, 30 percent say that getting a college degree is no longer worth it, but when their anonymity is more protect[ed], only 2 percent actually hold that perspective.”
Sorensen ended her presentation with a question-and-answer section where she clarified that public opinion polls are still relevant to gauging political support because private opinion polling is time-consuming and not ubiquitous.
Sean Sebrey ’25 kicked off the “Political Rhetoric” panel with his presentation “The Art of the Zinger: How Ad Hominem Attacks and Candidate Identities Affect Viewer Reactions to Political Debates.”
Sebrey’s project was motivated by the question: “What explains variation in reactions to ad hominem attacks in political debates?” He defined ad hominem political attacks as being based on credibility, likability or character, rather than the substantive arguments an opponent is making.
“You have, often, this rift between these debate traditionalists who see ad hoc end attacks as unethical, fallacious and ineffective,” Sebrey said. “On the other hand, you have a lot of ‘real world’ debaters, your political commentators and people of that nature, who see ad hoc attacks as a useful tool. But despite this big controversy, we lack any empirical conclusions about the effectiveness of these attacks. So that’s what inspired me to do this research.”
Sebrey investigated how incivility, humor and the gender of the perpetrator or recipient of the ad hominem attack influenced people’s responses to the attack. To do so, he created an online survey that gathered respondents’ demographic information, presented a fictional vignette of an ad hominem attack in a debate and asked respondents about their reactions to the vignette, including which candidate would get their vote.
The gender variable produced the finding that Sebrey sees as most surprising.
“I didn’t find any statistical significance in the change in how viewers reacted to these ad hominem attacks based on the gender of the candidate,” Sebrey explained. “That’s super interesting because it flies in the face of all the reading that I did on gender studies.”
Matthew Kiernan’s ’25 presentation, “Mission Accomplished? How US Presidents Narrate the Withdrawal from Afghanistan,” made up the other half of the “Political Rhetoric” section.
Kiernan became interested in U.S. involvement in Afghanistan in 2021, when the U.S. withdrew troops from the country. He realized that there was a lack of scholarship around the rhetoric and language used to discuss the U.S.’s withdrawal and decided to focus his research around that gap.
Kiernan read and analyzed speeches from the presidents who have held office during the U.S.’s involvement in Afghanistan: President George W. Bush, President Barack Obama, President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden. His reading and analysis focused on the words associated with Afghanistan.
From this research, Kiernan concluded that a change in administration does not mean a change in rhetoric. For example, he was surprised to find the lack of change in the language about Afghanistan between Trump’s first term and Biden’s time in office. He found that Biden used language that many would label conservative.
Kiernan also found that Bush’s language centered around terrorism, Obama’s highlighted responsibility, Trump’s focused on cooperation and strategically applied force and Biden’s characterized the conflict as a “forever war” that it was time for the U.S. to end.
The concluding section of the conference titled “Conflict & Violence” began with a presentation by Kyra Layman ’25 titled “Courage Under Crisis: Examining Altruistic Resistance in Mass Atrocities.”
Layman explained that during mass atrocities, there are three main groups within a society: perpetrators, victims and bystanders, which then divide into “helpers” and “passive bystanders.” It is the helpers on which Layman concentrated their research.
She created five subcategories for the helpers: messengers, rescuers, activators, planters and fighters. Her hypotheses included that people with platforms, such as journalists, priests and other public figures, are usually the activators, who disseminate reliable information. People with connection to victims are more likely to be messengers and rescuers, while organizers fall under the category of activators and fighters.
Layman then ran a regression analysis, working on five case studies and 133 cases. Their regressions are still in progress so she did not reveal the results.
Mayumi Morgan’25 then began her presentation on Japanese Brazilians which was based on the research she did while studying away in São Paulo, Brazil: “Ideological Violence: Japanese Conflict Over WWII in Brazil.”
A year after Japan’s surrender to the Allied Powers, which effectively ended WWII, 23 members of Brazil’s Japanese community were killed by “an ultra nationalist action for their immigrant community.” Morgan aimed to find out what the causes for this conflict were, arguing that to find an answer, one must consider the Japanese nationalist identity formation that occurred before the Japanese arrived in Brazil.
Morgan explained that Japanese immigrants came to Brazil to take advantage of the growing coffee market, planning to return to Japan once they gained enough wealth. She thus argued that the relationship between the Japanese and the native Brazilians in the period of 1900-1950 was “a colonized relationship, or something akin to colonialism.”
Shweta Shankar ’26 held the final presentation of the conference titled, “Hindu Nationalism and the Myth of Unity: The Conflation of Religion, State and Identity.”
As a daughter of two Indian immigrants, Shankar decided to explore the concept of “Hindutva,” Indian political ideology, which centralizes Hinduism and calls for Hinduist hegemony in the country. Shankar focused on Hindutva’s domestic and international consequences, focusing mainly on the tensions between Hindus and Muslims in the Indian diaspora.
Discussing domestic and international examples, Shankar concluded that the rise of the right, functioning through politics of fear and Hindu nationalism in India, leads to religious suppression. She concluded her speech with what she called a “little bit outrageous” — that she firmly believes that Modi is the new face of fascism.
* Rylan Mueller is a Staff Writer for The Mac Weekly
vspurna@macalester.edu
estern@macalester.edu
yconn@macalester.edu
