Professional Affiliation

Professor of Political Science, University of Tennessee-Knoxville

Expert Bio

Jana Morgan (PhD, UNC) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee and Associate Editor for Latin American Research Review. Her scholarship explores how political and socioeconomic inequalities undermine democracy across the Americas. She authored Bankrupt Representation and Party System Collapse, winner of the Van Cott Award from the Latin American Studies Association. Drawing on fieldwork in Venezuela, the book demonstrates how representational failures cause party system decay and enable anti-system outsiders. She is also co-author of Hijacking the Agenda: Economic Power and Political Influence, which won the American Political Science Association’s Gladys Kammerer Award. Hijacking the Agenda details how resource inequalities cause policymakers to prioritize wealthy interests and ignore others. She has also published over two dozen peer-reviewed articles and chapters. Morgan has been a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and is regularly invited to speak and consult at universities, think tanks, and government agencies.

Expertise

• Democracy
• Governance

Wilson Center Project

Exclusionary Democracy: How Ethnoracial Hierarchies Distort Democratic Citizenship

Project Summary

Systemic ethnoracial hierarchies remains deeply entrenched in Latin America, particularly harming Black and Indigenous people who encounter repeated barriers to equality. Simultaneously, democracy appears increasingly precarious. Far from independent processes, this research argues that persistent ethnoracial hierarchies contribute to the vulnerability of democratic governance. Analyses of cross-national survey data, in-depth interviews with Black and Indigenous activists and policymakers, original survey experiments, and insights from field research in Peru demonstrate how ethnoracial hierarchies challenge democracy, perpetuating suffering among marginalized group members and marring how the privileged behave as democratic citizens. Structural inequalities provoke unrest, undermine confidence in government, and weaken democratic legitimacy.

Major Publications

• Jana Morgan. Bankrupt Representation and Party System Collapse. 2011. Penn State University Press.
• Jana Morgan and Nathan J. Kelly. 2021. “Inequality, Exclusion, and Tolerance for Dissent in Latin America.” Comparative Political Studies. 54 (11): 2019-2051.
• Jana Morgan and Nathan J. Kelly. 2017. “Social Patterns of Inequality, Partisan Competition, and Latin American Support for Redistribution.” Journal of Politics 79 (1): 193-209.