Shana Alyse Kushner Gadarian is an American political psychologist. She is an Associate professor of Political Science at Syracuse University. Her co-authored book Anxious Politics: Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World received the Robert E. Lane Award for being the best book in political psychology published in 2015.
Upon earning her PhD, Kushner Gadarian accepted a faculty position at Swarthmore College as an instructor. She spent one year there before accepting a three year Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. During the fall of 2011, Kushner Gadarian joined the faculty of Political Science at Syracuse University. As an assistant professor, Kushner Gadarian earned a Norway Research Council grant to conduct a long-term study of the effect of terrorism on social capital. In the same year, she received the Society for Political Methodology's Harold F. Gosnell Prize with seven other scientists for their "Topic Models for Open-Ended Survey Responses with Applications to Experiments" project. In 2015, Kushner Gadarian co-published a book with Bethany Albertson titled Anxious Politics: Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World, which detailed how anxiety can influence political elections. They found that when a threat is present, citizens tend to rely on government officials as "experts" and vote towards bills that are focused on protecting against said threat. Beyond acts of terrorism, they also examined how the 2009 swine flu pandemic and the fictional smallpox outbreak, which they later re-examined in a modern context during the coronavirus pandemic. Their book received the Robert E. Lane Award for being the best book in political psychology published in 2015 and she earned the 2015 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award for Teaching and Research. In 2017, Kushner Gadarian was promoted to Associate professor of Political Science with tenure. She also received the 2017 Best Paper Award from the Urban and Local Politics Section of American Political Science Association and 2018 Best Paper Award in American Politics from the Midwest Political Science Association.
