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government masthead  Government Undergraduate Wins Best Paper
Award  Nathan Abell wins top prize at national conference
Posted: June 25, 2010  Government student Nathan Abell has
received the 2010 First Place Prize for Best Undergraduate
Student Paper at the 18th Annual Illinois State University
National Conference for Students of Political Science. Abell won
the award for his paper, “Theory and Practice of Structural
Agenda Setting: A Case Study of U.S. HIV/AIDS Policy from 1979
to 1989.”  In his paper, Abell offers a truly novel approach to
agenda setting studies by identifying a lack of emphasis in the
current literature on the structure within which agenda setting
decisions are made. Focusing on the federal government’s lack of
timely response to the severity of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Abell
points out that the problem was not simply lack of medical
knowledge, nor active homophobia, but a combination of the two
that can only be understood by acc