Amy Zhang wins the 2022 Avery Leiserson Award for her paper “The COVID-19 Pandemic and Interpersonal Trust in Latin America”
The department bestows the Avery Leiserson Award for the best undergraduate paper in political science. Amy’s paper explores what happens to interpersonal trust when disaster strikes. Through careful statistical work, she shows that not only did the pandemic not erode trust in Latin America as we might have expected; but that in instances of high income inequality, particularly bad experiences with COVID might have increased trust among the wealthy. This is an important advancement in our understanding of the many ways that inequality might exacerbate other disparities in quality of life.