Jennifer McCoy is Regent’s Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. An expert on democratic resilience, erosion, and political polarization, she has been a visiting scholar at Central European University’s Democracy Institute in Budapest, at Koç University in Istanbul, and at Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin (2022–2023). McCoy’s research program investigates the causes, consequences, and solutions to polarized societies both globally and in the U.S. She coined the term “pernicious polarization” to refer to the divisions of societies into mutually distrustful camps, threatening democratic governance. Leading an international team of scholars, she published, with Murat Somer, two volumes of this research, and is completing a book on “Depolarizing Politics: Preventing and Overcoming Pernicious Polarization.” McCoy was director (1998–2015) of the Americas Program at the Carter Center, leading projects on democratic quality, mediation, and dialogue.
McCoy’s project, “Mitigating Pernicious Polarization through Innovative Civic EducationalInterventions,” aims to build student civic skills and dispositions to navigate a hyperpolarized context, remain open to contending viewpoints, and become engaged rather than alienated citizens. With coinvestigator Michael Evans, senior lecturer at Georgia State University, McCoy will measure the impact of innovative civic education assignments given to over 16,000 students at two universities over two years, identifying the most effective pedagogical approaches to reduce polarization that can be scaled nationally.
May 2024
