Director of the Office of Undergrad Research Peter Civetta and Chair of the URG review committee Neal Blair presenting Jamie Druckman and Alexandria Fredendall with their awards
Alexandria Fredendall has been announced as the winner of this year’s Academic Year Fletcher Award, for her project “Sports, Politics, and Weather: A Quantitative Analysis of Irrelevant Events and Public Opinion.” Her advisor Jamie Druckman, Professor of Political Science in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, was presented with the Karl Rosengren Faculty Mentoring Award.
A senior studying political science and math, Alexandria studied how irrelevant events affect public opinion. She realized that the basis of representative democracy lies in the belief that citizens choose political leaders based upon political fact rather than emotional extrapolation from other aspects of their life. Through previous literature she found a trend that suggested otherwise. The public was making decisions based upon criteria completely irrelevant to politics such as the weather or the performance of their favorite sports team. Her study moved beyond past work by documenting, for the first time, a direct casual impact of such irrelevant events. Specifically, she presented results from a novel experiment that shows how the outcome of a sporting event (the National Collegiate Athletic Association football championship game) substantially shapes individuals emotions which then drive their political assessments.
Funded by the Fletcher Family Foundation, the $250 Fletcher prizes are awarded to undergraduates for research conducted during the Academic Year or the Summer with support from an Undergraduate Research Grant. The Undergraduate Research Grants committee, made up of faculty from across Northwestern, reviewed nominations for the Fletcher Awards, taking into consideration the quality of the initial proposal, the final research findings, the statements of the faculty sponsor and the opinions of the original reviewers of the proposal.
Students’ faculty advisers also receive the Karl Rosengren Faculty Mentoring Award, including $250, in recognition of their work with the students. The mentoring award is named for the long-time Undergraduate Research Grants review committee chair, who left Northwestern last summer.