Keira Boop ’23 presented
paper on crisis response insights from coronavirus outbreak
CONWAY, Ark. (May 17, 2023) – Keira Boop, a politics
major in the class of 2023, won the Best Undergraduate Paper Award of 2023 for
her project, “What Factors Impact the Speed of Crisis Response? Insights from
COVID-19,” which she presented this spring at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Arkansas
Political Science Association (ArkPSA).
Boop’s work examined the speed at which 80 different
countries responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, engaging various theories of
crisis response, utilizing two separate datasets.
“The innovative move that Keira makes with this paper
is to take a measure of how many protective policies were in place and turn it
into a measure of time – how long it took to reach a certain threshold of
protectiveness,” said Hendrix Professor of Politics Dr. Kim Maslin, who
supervised Boop’s capstone project. “Counter to conventional wisdom, wealthy
and developed nations had slower response times, whereas presidential and
unitary systems had faster response times than parliamentary and federal
systems.”
Maslin added, “Keira was able to produce such a
high-quality paper because she was fully committed to the process. She worked
the steps and incorporated the feedback that her colleagues provided.”
Boop was also selected to present her research at the
highly selective National Student Research Conference of Pi Sigma Alpha, the
Political Science Honors Society. The conference met in Washington, D.C.
Boop was awarded the Hendrix Politics Department’s
Ian T. King Prize in International Relations at the College’s April 27 Honors
Day Convocation, and graduated with distinction in politics at the College’s
May 13 Commencement ceremony.
About Hendrix College
A private liberal arts college in Conway, Arkansas,
Hendrix College consistently earns recognition as one of the country’s leading
liberal arts institutions, and is featured in Colleges That Change
Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges. Its
academic quality and rigor, innovation, and value have established Hendrix as a
fixture in numerous college guides, lists, and rankings. Founded in 1876,
Hendrix has been affiliated with the United Methodist Church since 1884. To
learn more, visit www.hendrix.edu.