Rebecca Gill (Political Science) and coauthors Christopher Zorn (Penn State University) and Jennie Sweet-Cushman (Chatham University) won the 2026 Jewell Limar Prestage Best Paper Award from the Southwestern Political Science Association for their paper “Gender and the Misperception of Women’s Representation in State Legislatures and Congress.” This award recognizes the best paper on the intersection of gender, race, ethnicity, and political behavior.

In the paper, Gill and her colleagues investigate why people misunderstand the degree of women’s representation in Congress and their own state legislatures. They take advantage of cross-state variation in the latter to consider several possible explanations for why some members of the public over- or underestimate the percentage of women serving in those bodies. Rather than being driven by political knowledge, they find that misperceptions of women’s representation are driven by individuals’ political beliefs, in a manner consistent with psychological theories of motivated reasoning.