Thomas Pepinsky, assistant professor of government, won the American Political Science Association's (APSA) 2010 Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award, given for the best paper presented at the association's annual meeting the previous year. "Testing Islam's Political Advantage: Evidence from Indonesia" (co-authored with Saiful Mujani of Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University and William Liddle of Ohio State University) shared the prize with another paper.

The citation for the paper said the authors "... shed important new light on how voters react to Islamic parties. By using a carefully constructed survey experiment, they convincingly demonstrate that Indonesian voters are more inclined to support parties based on their economic platforms rather than their religious ideology. They also show, however, that when little information is available, voters may regard a party's Islamic identity as a proxy for the economic policies it is likely to pursue. This conclusion should invigorate the conversation on the political appeals of Islam in a comparative context, while the impressive survey data collection on which it rests ought to inspire emulation."

Pepinsky is a faculty affiliate of the Southeast Asia Program, executive director of the International Political Economy program at Cornell, and associate director of the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project. His research includes international finance, authoritarianism and regime change, and the modern political economy of Southeast Asia.

The award will be presented Sept. 2 at the 2010 APSA annual meeting in Washington, D.C.