Elizabeth
McKenna

I am an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2025 to 2027), and director of the Civic Power Lab. I earned my Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley in 2020.

My new book manuscript, The Paradox of Participation: Organizing Authoritarianism in Democratic Brazil (available upon request, under review at Cambridge University Press for the Contentious Politics series), draws on a decade of mixed-methods research and argues that the capacities that give civic actors power are independent of the properties that make that power democratic. Whether civic participation helps sustain democracy or erode it depends on whether members govern the organizations to which they belong, and whether their substantive claims are inclusionary or exclusionary.

My fourth book project, The Regulars: The Making and Measure of Democratic Agency, addresses a central puzzle of contemporary American politics. Voting and protest participation have surged over the past decade while ordinary people’s influence over public life has not. The book attributes the gap to democratic agency, the capacity to act together on public problems and to develop that ability in others, and shows it is produced inside organizations. Drawing on person-level participation records from inside 38 groups in ten states, the book documents how commitment and democratic leadership are cultivated and develops measures of both. Data collection is complete, one chapter is available as a working paper, and I’ve written about early findings in the Boston Globe here and here. I am also the editor of Organized: The Mamdani Campaign and the Case for People-First Politics, a ten-contributor volume on the 2025 Mamdani campaign for New York City mayor and the decade of organizing infrastructure that made it possible; manuscript delivery Spring 2027.

To produce research that informs practice, my lab built POLIS, the largest behavioral database of civic organizing yet assembled, and is now building Groundwork, a software platform that will generate such records prospectively, with participant consent, as a byproduct of movements’ daily work.

My work has helped philanthropy measure civic capacity through Power Metrics and the Civic Power report, informed the Biden-Harris initiative on public participation in federal rulemaking, and been adopted as required reading for field organizers across the political spectrum.

I am the recipient of the HKS Teaching Innovation Award (2026), the Analyst Institute’s Expy Award for political research innovation (2025), the Michael Harrington Book Award from the American Political Science Association (2022), and the Best Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association (2021), as well as a Dean’s Teaching Award in every semester I have taught at HKS.