Mollie Cohen

Promoted to Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
mjcohen@purdue.edu

Mollie Cohen studies elections, public opinion and voting behavior, especially in Latin America. Much of her work examines how democratic crises and features of election administration impacts citizens' attitudes, as well as their decisions at the ballot box. Her book,  None of the Above: Protest Voting in Latin American Democracies (University of Michigan Press, 2024), examines how democratic backsliding fuels the emergence and success of campaigns promoting blank or spoiled votes. Her research has been published at the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, Political Behavior, and  ublic Opinion Quarterly, among other outlets, and has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. She has also written and edited several reports for LAPOP's Insights series and contributed to The Conversation, The Monkey Cage Blog, and Mischiefs of Faction.

Cohen’s work contributes to core debates about citizen participation in political science and answers urgent questions about contemporary politics. Her methodological projects contribute to foundational social science questions and respond to public and scholarly concerns about bias in the inferences researchers draw from survey data. Cohen’s research helps to explain the contours of the current global crisis of democracy and underscores the challenges that lie ahead.

Mollie Cohen received her PhD from Vanderbilt University. Before joining the faculty at Purdue, Cohen was an assistant professor of International Affairs at the University of Georgia, and a postdoctoral research fellow at the LAPOP Lab.