Lilliana Mason awarded Andrew Carnegie Fellowship

Lilliana Mason, associate professor of political science at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, has been named to the 2024 class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows. The 28 scholars selected this year will each receive grants of up to $200,000 to research political polarization.

The Carnegie Fellows Program was founded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 2015 to support research in the humanities and social sciences, distributing over $50 million to date. Recipients are expected to produce either a book or a significant study in their field.

"We are thrilled that Lilliana's important work on political polarization is being recognized in this way, giving her the opportunity to delve deeper into its causes and implications," said Hahrie Han, director of the SNF Agora Institute and a professor of political science. "The SNF Agora Institute is committed to generating scholarly insights that can help strengthen democracy; better insight into the role polarization plays in our democracy will enable us to identify interventions that counteract its anti-democratic effects."

Mason, author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity and co-author of Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy, is a well-respected expert on political polarization. She plans to use the fellowship to write another book re-examining the topic.

"This is an evolution of my own understanding of American politics, looking at my previous data in new ways," Mason said. "Explaining the roots of [polarization] made me think more critically about whether this thing that I've been studying for my whole career is really the most precise way to understand our problems."

According to Mason, changes in the Republican Party have attracted far-right Americans who previously felt unrepresented by the two-party system, increasing the country's sense of political polarization.

"It's very comfortable for us to use the term 'polarization' because it blames no one," she said. "Over the last couple of decades, we've seen that real anti-democracy actors have become engaged in politics in a way that gives them a lot of control over our political system and invites a lot of animosity and disagreement ... so what I'm trying to do is to reconceptualize the real threat to American democracy from this nebulous concept of polarization to a more direct and measurable phenomenon that we actually do see in our data."

Mason was nominated for the fellowship by the Institute of International Education.

This year's "political polarization" cohort marks the first time that Carnegie Fellows were selected to fit an exclusive theme. In 2023, the program committed to funding polarization research for at least three years.

"The fragility of American democracy has been exposed in recent years to a degree that is quite frightening," said Carnegie Corporation of New York President Louise Richardson in an official statement. "The driving force appears to be the increasing polarization of American politics and, by extension, American society. We would like to understand this polarization, what caused it, what perpetuates it, and above all, how it might be mitigated, or even reversed, by strengthening the forces of cohesion in our society."