About

This profile was current as of 2024, when she was part of the on-campus Kellogg community.

Kellogg Visiting Fellow Jana Morgan is professor of political science at the University of Tennessee and associate editor of the Latin American Research Review (LARR). Her research explores how social and economic inequalities and representational deficits affect marginalized groups and undermine democracy across the Americas.

At the Kellogg Institute, Morgan will work on her book project, “Exclusionary Democracy: How Ethnoracial Hierarchies Threaten Democratic Citizenship,” which demonstrates how ethnoracial hierarchies distort democratic citizenship using insights from cross-national opinion data, survey experiments, and fieldwork in Peru.

Morgan’s most recent book is the co-authored Hijacking the Agenda: Economic Power and Political Influence (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2021), which received the Gladys Kammerer Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association. The book combines quantitative text analysis with in-depth process tracing to detail how inequalities between competing economic interests cause policymakers to focus on issues prioritized by the wealthy and ignore middle-class concerns. Her 2011 book Bankrupt Representation and Party System Collapse (Penn State University Press) won the Van Cott Best Book Award from the Political Institutions section of the Latin American Studies Association. 

In addition to books and book chapters, Morgan has authored numerous papers that have appeared in journals such as American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, and Latin American Research Review, among others. Her work has received external funding from sources including the Pew Foundation, Fulbright-Hays program, and Russell Sage Foundation, where she was a Visiting Scholar in 2017-2018. After her time at Notre Dame, Morgan will be a Residential Fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC.

Morgan has served as co-director and adviser for eight rounds of the AmericasBarometer surveys conducted by the Latin American Public Opinion Project in the Dominican Republic. She holds a PhD in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

KDR Assistant(s):
Parker Gaines
Sadie Johnston