Why Has the United States Become So Polarized?

Many of us make assumptions about polarization, but how sure are we that we are right? The 2024 Andrew Carnegie Fellows are developing a body of research around its causes and implications

By Carnegie Corporation of New York May 7, 2024

Polarization Andrew Carnegie Fellows

Many of us make assumptions about polarization, but how sure are we that we are right? Our scholars are developing a body of research around its causes and implications.

Why do so many Americans appear to vote for candidates more extreme than themselves — or fail to vote at all? Could we predict which conspiracy theories will become violent or harmful, and stop them before they spread? How do online algorithms exacerbate political polarization, and could we redesign them to lessen it? What does political polarization do to our health?

These questions and more are part of 28 new projects funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York that will contribute to a body of research around political polarization in the United States. The philanthropic foundation will commit up to $6 million annually to the program for at least the next three years.

“Today, we are absolutely delighted to announce the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Class of 2024. This initiative represents a commitment by the Corporation to mine academia for ideas that will help us to understand one of the most critical problems facing the country, the problem of polarization, which is tearing our society apart and damaging our democracy,” said Dame Louise Richardson, president of the Corporation. “Where did this polarization come from? How did it evolve? Why has it occurred at this time? Above all, what might we be able to do to mitigate its nefarious effects? In other words, how might we together build the forces of social cohesion?”

The 2024 class is the current iteration of the Corporation’s longstanding support for scholarly research. Established in 2015, the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program has supported more than 270 fellows with a total investment of more than $54 million. Richardson, a political scientist, refocused the fellowship program on political polarization as one of her first initiatives after joining the Corporation in January 2023, as part of a larger effort to reduce political polarization through the foundation’s grantmaking.

“I spent much of my career studying terrorists and found that one attribute terrorists invariably share is a highly oversimplified view of the world: seeing the world in binary or black-and-white terms, seeing themselves as the good guys and their enemies as the bad guys,” said Richardson. “Unfortunately, there appears to be an increasing tendency in our politics to adopt an oversimplified, Manichean view of the world.”

Prior to its focus on polarization, Andrew Carnegie Fellows covered a wide range of fields. Congressional testimony by past fellows has addressed topics such as social media and privacy protections, transnational crime, governmental responses to pandemics, and college affordability. Past fellows have been recognized with major honors for their Corporation-supported work, including a Nobel Prize and a National Book Award.

“With this class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows, we will take a deeper step in building a field to address this critically important challenge of polarization,” said John J. DeGioia, chair of the jury that selected the fellows and president of Georgetown University. “Our hope with this project is to draw from the great strengths of the academy, from throughout our country, and deepen our understanding of what we need to focus on to bring us all together.”

Nominations were received from more than 650 leaders at universities, research institutions, professional societies, think tanks, major university presses, and leading publications. The final selection was made by a distinguished panel of 13 jurors who met for two days of deliberations in April at the Corporation’s headquarters in New York City.

“We have chosen an enormously accomplished group of academics from all across the country, from public to private institutions, quite junior as well as senior academics and from across a range of disciplines,” said Richardson. “We have fellows from the world of computer science, from public health, from history, psychology, political science — all taking different perspectives on this problem.”

“We hope that over time, we will be able to use the ideas that we gain from this work to influence our future grantmaking so that we will be able to support nonprofit organizations around the country who are working together to mitigate the impact of polarization in their communities.”

The fellows will be working to break new ground, from analyzing the largest dataset ever obtained from Meta to understand social media’s true impact on polarization, to developing new methods to help high school students talk out their political differences. Each fellow will receive a stipend of $200,000 to fund their discoveries and allow them to be shared as widely as possible.

“One of the real advantages of using academic research to explore these topics is that we will be able to look for evidence on which we base our decisions," said Richardson. "Many of us make assumptions about the causes and implications of polarization, but how sure are we that we are right? We tend to assume that social media has enormously contributed to polarization. Is this true? How do we know?”

“We’ll also look at the nature of our democracy and whether and how our structures might contribute to polarization. Another widely held assumption is that our society really is polarized, but how true is this? Some of our applicants suggest that maybe it is our politicians who are polarized, while there is far more common ground amongst the population at large. If this is true, what are the implications of this and how might we adjust accordingly? If we understand the nature of the problem we face, we will be able to devise more effective policies to counter it.”

The anticipated result of the fellowship is a book or major study. In this way, the Corporation seeks to generate evidence-based, actionable research that informs decision-making and public policy. Read more about the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program, the work of past honorees, the criteria for proposals, and a historical timeline of scholarly research supported by the Corporation.