John Carey is the John Wentworth Professor in the Social Sciences and professor of government at Dartmouth College. His research is on what makes democracies thrive and why they sometimes fail. He has published widely on the design of electoral rules and how they affect the quality of representation. Recently, he has also conducted research on why people believe in conspiracy theories, and what are the effects on politics. A separate project focuses on what students really think about campus diversity.
Carey currently serves as Associate Dean of Faculty for the Social Sciences and was the chair of Dartmouth’s Department of Government from 2009 to 2015. He is the co-founder of BrightLineWatch.org, which monitors threats to democracy in the United States. Carey was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. He received a PhD in political science from the University of California, San Diego, in 1994. Before Dartmouth, he has held posts at the University of Rochester and Washington University in St. Louis and has taught at the Universidad Católica de Chile, Harvard, and the Fundación Juan March in Madrid, Spain. Over the years, he has done consulting on electoral system design in Afghanistan, Canada, Israel, Jordan, Nepal, South Sudan, Tunisia, and Yemen.