experts
Jennifer McCoy
Nonresident Scholar, Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program

about


Jennifer McCoy is a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is also Regent’s Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University in Atlanta and a research affiliate at the Democracy Institute of Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. Dr. McCoy's areas of expertise include democratic resilience, erosion, and recovery; political polarization and depolarization; crisis prevention and conflict resolution; democracy promotion and collective defense of democracy; election processes and international election observation; and Latin American Politics.

Dr. McCoy’s current book projects are Depolarizing Politics: Preventing and Overcoming Pernicious Polarization, and Opposition Strategies to Fight Autocratization, with coauthor Murat Somer. Dr. McCoy’s long-term 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 and Murat Somer developed the concept of “pernicious polarization” to refer to the political polarization that divides societies into mutually distrustful “Us vs. Them” camps and threatens democratic governance. 

McCoy was named a 2024 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, one of 28 scholars nationwide who will explore political polarization as well as what might help tackle division and strengthen American democracy. The two-year project, “Mitigating Pernicious Polarization through Innovative Civic Educational Interventions,” with co-investigator Michael Evans, aims to assess pedagogical innovations to build student civic skills and dispositions to navigate the growing challenges of disinformation, distrust in government, divisive political rhetoric, and social fragmentation.

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 has authored or edited six books and dozens of articles. Recent volumes include Polarizing Polities: A Global Threat to Democracy (2019), 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.

Dr. McCoy’s personal website is sites.gsu.edu/jmccoy.

education
PhD, University of Minnesota, BA, Oklahoma State University  
languages
English, Spanish