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.
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.
Evidence is strong that affective polarization and democratic backsliding are interlinked phenomena.
Universal support for the liberal democratic status quo has been weaker among those who support whichever party has the presidency, well before and since the Trump presidency.
Political polarization is a systemic-level and multifaceted process that severs cross-cutting ties and shifts perceptions of politics to a zero-sum game.
The lack of consensus on the definition and measurement of polarization continues to hamper generalized conclusions on the relationship between polarization and autocratization.
Interest in populist voters has risen with the election of Donald Trump in the United States, the rise of right-wing populist parties in Europe, and the longevity of populist leaders in countries like Italy, Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela. Yet, little attention has been given to what mechanisms may affect populist attitudes, leaving us without recommendations for media or politicians on how to mitigate populism’s known negative effects.
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.
An examination of the role of political polarization in backsliding and the combined importance of political agency and institutional levers for regime outcomes.
