Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow Best Article Award Winner 2026: Biko Koenig and Tali Mendelberg, for “The Symbolic Politics of Status in the MAGA Movement.”

Winner: Biko Koenig (Franklin and Marshall College) and Tali Mendelberg (Princeton University), “The Symbolic Politics of Status in the MAGA Movement,” Perspectives on Politics 24, no. 1 (2026): 238–255.

Koenig and Mendelberg’s “The Symbolic Politics of Status in the MAGA Movement” (2025) asks not just who votes for Donald Trump or why, but what motivates his most committed supporters. The authors’ answer is the symbolic politics of status: the conflict over where one’s group ranks in social esteem, honor, and respect. Elections, on this account, do more than allocate resources and enact policies. They signal which people, and whose ways of life, stand high or low in the eyes of society. MAGA, in turn, is not merely an aggregation of voters. Rather, as the authors show, it must be understood and analyzed as a social movement, organized around a shared sense of status unjustly lost, and engaging its participants through pride, joy, and belonging as much as through anger and resentment. These insights emerge from ethnographic research of exemplary depth and care: five months of participant observation inside the 2020 Trump campaign in northeastern Pennsylvania and roughly seventy interviews with its activists. At once rigorous in its method and empathetic toward the people it studies, the article demonstrates the distinctive value of interpretive inquiry for both explaining and understanding American politics.

Selection Committee:
Reo Matsuzaki (Chair), Trinity College
Tamir Moustafa, Simon Fraser University
Johanna Söderström, Uppsala University