Politics in Question

In this week's episode of Politics In Question, Jennifer McCoy joins Julia, Lee, and James to discuss political polarization in the United States and worldwide. McCoy is a professor of political science at Georgia State University. Her research examines democratization, polarization, mediation and conflict prevention, election processes and election observation, and Latin American politics.  McCoy is the author of several articles and books, and recently co-edited a volume of The Annals with Murat Somer exploring pernicious polarization in eleven countries (Polarizing Polities: A Global Threat to Democracy). Her current research project on Polarized Democracies seeks to determine the causes, consequences, and solutions to polarized societies worldwide, including Venezuela, Turkey, Hungary, Thailand, Hungary, Greece, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and the United States.

What is pernicious polarization? How worried should we be about it? How does populism fuel the phenomenon? What lessons can we learn from efforts to combat it in other nations? How does the American political system differ from the nation-state model? And does that difference alter how we should think about the influence of pernicious polarization on American politics? These are some of the questions that Jennifer, Julia, Lee, and James ask in this week’s episode.