Liz McKenna

Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

Liz McKenna is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she directs the Civic Power Lab, and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. A sociologist of democracy, she studies how ordinary people become organized political actors and under what conditions civic participation strengthens or corrodes democratic institutions.

She is the co-author of Groundbreakers (Oxford University Press) and Prisms of the People (University of Chicago Press), which won the American Political Science Association’s Michael Harrington Book Award. Her forthcoming book, The Paradox of Participation: Organizing Authoritarianism in Democratic Brazil, draws on the dissertation that won the American Sociological Association’s Best Dissertation Award.

Her lab holds the largest behavioral database of civic organizing yet assembled. Her research has been covered in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, and The New Yorker. Before academia she was a community organizer in Ohio and Rio de Janeiro.