Jennifer McCoy is professor of political science at Georgia State University and nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She was a senior core fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Budapest, Hungary in spring 2019. McCoy was chosen for the inaugural class of Distinguished University Professorships at Georgia State University in 2013. Specializing in international and comparative politics, Dr. McCoy's areas of expertise include democratic resilience, democratic erosion, and partisan polarization; crisis prevention and conflict resolution; democracy promotion and collective defense of democracy; election processes and international election observation; and Latin American Politics. McCoy’s research program on polarized politics aims to identify the causes, consequences for democracy, and solutions to polarized societies around the world, including the United States. She coined the term “pernicious polarization” to refer to the political polarization that divides societies into mutually distrustful “Us vs. Them” camps, and undermines the capacity of democracies to address critical policy problems.
McCoy served as director of the Carter Center’s Americas Program (1998-2015), leading projects on democratic strengthening, mediation and dialogue, and hemispheric cooperation. She led over a dozen international election observation missions to Latin America. An internationally known expert on Venezuelan politics, McCoy represented the Carter Center in the tripartite mediation effort with the UN and OAS in 2002-2004, led election observation missions and media-strengthening projects until 2015, and has published numerous articles and books about Venezuela. McCoy organized former President Carter’s historic trips to Cuba in 2002 and 2011, advised on the Colombia Peace Accord 2014-2016, mediated between Ecuador and Colombia in 2009-2010, and led democracy-strengthening projects in Central America, Bolivia, and Peru.
Dr. McCoy has authored or edited six books and dozens of articles. Her recent volumes include Polarizing Polities: A Global Threat to Democracy (2019) and Polarization and Democracy: A Janus-faced Relationship with Pernicious Consequences (2018), both co-edited with Murat Somer, and International Mediation in Venezuela, with Francisco Diez (2012). McCoy is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Women’s Forum, and the Scholars Strategy Network.
Pernicious polarization is a process that divides an electorate into two mutually distrustful camps. It can be thought of as us-versus-them polarization. It occurs when politics is reduced to a single dividing line around some kind of identity.
Polarization is a mortal threat to democracy, and if the United States hopes to avoid violence and authoritarianism it needs to contemplate significant reforms to its political institutions and reinvigorate a commitment to a common purpose.
As illiberal leaders continue to degrade democracy around the world, some pro-democracy activists and candidates are crossing ideological divides to challenge these incumbents.
Pernicious polarization is spreading like wildfire across democracies around the world.
Three factors explain Erdogan’s stronger-than-expected first-round performance.
When former President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn Carter founded the nonprofit Carter Center in 1982, one of their goals was to help Latin American countries – many of which were emerging from decades of military dictatorship – transition to democracies.
In the past 40 years, the United States has polarized a lot faster than other wealthy democracies like Canada or Germany. Why is the U.S. so different?
Georgia’s head-grabbing Senate race pitting Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock against former professional football player and Trump favorite Herschel Walker is headed for a December runoff.
From the US to Brazil to India, deepening political polarisation is used as a frame through which to see a lot of 21st-century politics. But what can actually be done to depolarise deeply divided societies, particularly democracies?
One year ago, Tunisian President Kais Saied’s self-coup put the country’s democratic transition in jeopardy. Carnegie experts examine the key aspects of Tunisia’s stalled transition through a comparative lens, both with other countries’ transitions and Tunisia’s own sectoral changes over time.
