SNF Agora Institute associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, Lilliana Mason is author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity(University of Chicago Press, 2018) and coauthor, with Nathan P. Kalmoe, of Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy (2022). She received a PhD in political psychology from Stony Brook University and a BA in politics from Princeton University. Her research on partisan identity, partisan bias, social sorting, and political violence has been published in journals such as the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and Political Behavior, and has also been featured in media outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and National Public Radio.
Pluralistic democracy cannot function when one of two political parties is controlled by a faction with deep feelings of intolerance toward the marginalized groups associated with the other party. In this case, “polarization” is not the problem. We should not hope — in order to reduce polarization between the parties — that the left moves to marginalize these groups as well. Mason’s project, “Addressing Polarization by Prioritizing Pluralistic Democracy,” will investigate these underlying roots of “polarization” in American politics.
May 2024
