Yale political scientist Milan Svolik has received a 2025 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship to support his work on political polarization and democratic backsliding.
Svolik, the Elizabeth S. & A. Varick Stout Professor of Political Science in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, is among 26 scholars awarded the annual fellowship, which funds research projects in the social sciences and the humanities.
Each will receive a $200,000 grant to support research that “seeks to understand how and why our society has become so polarized and how we can strengthen the forces of cohesion to fortify our democracy,” according to an announcement from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
The 2025 class marks the second consecutive year that the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program has focused on building a body of research about political polarization. The Carnegie Corporation of New York has committed up to $18 million to this effort over a three-year period.
“Through these fellowships Carnegie is harnessing the unrivaled brainpower of our universities to help us to understand how our society has become so polarized,” Dame Louise Richardson, the president of the Carnegie Corporation, said. “Our future grantmaking will be informed by what we learn from these scholars as we seek to mitigate the pernicious effects of political polarization.”
Svolik studies the politics of authoritarianism and democratization. His current research includes work on democratic backsliding, support for democracy, and electoral manipulation. His 2012 book, “The Politics of Authoritarian Rule” (Cambridge University Press), earned the best book award from the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association.
The Carnegie fellowship will support a book project he is pursuing that examines democratic erosion in both the United States and around the world. The project will provide an original framework and diagnostic tools to advance people’s understanding of how polarization undermines democracy.
The fellowship recipients were selected from a pool of more than 300 applications. The panel of jurors prioritized proposals based on the originality and promise of the research, its potential impact on the field, and the applicants’ plans for communicating the findings to a broad audience.
Svolik is the 10th Yale faculty member to be named a Carnegie fellow since the program’s founding in 2015.
