Congratulations to these students who earned Distinction on their comps papers during 2008-09:
| Ben Barclay | Mixing Oil and Blood: Oil Vulnerability and the Propensity for Militarized Conflict After the Cold War |
| Colin Bottles | Political Bosses or Publics: Who Rules in Democracy? |
| Matt Cole | Political Evil and the Limits of Liberal Theory |
| Michael Martin | An Inconvenient Solution? An Economic & Political Analysis of Global Warming Policy |
| Steve Rashin | The Makings of a Paradox: Unionization of Subcontracted Labor in Chilean Copper Industry |
| Emma Sando | Poverty, Street Children, and Public Policy: El Centro de Atencion Integral de Ninez y Adolescencia (CAINA) |
| Jill Rodde | Fundamentalism and Family-Making: Regional Change in the American Fertility Shift |
| Tom Weishan | Detecting Emotion & Information: Detection & Categorization of Motivated Reasoning in Political Communication |
| Pat Whitehead | The Science of Conflict in Silico: An Agent-Based Update to Lewis F. Richardson’s Mathematical Theory of War |
| Alex Zuckerman | The Birth of Reason: Political Leadership in the Book of Genesis |