Didi Kuo
Center Fellow - Stanford University
Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Her research interests include democratization, political parties, state-building, and the political economy of representation.She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave - and Why They Don't (forthcoming, Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the Rise of Programmatic Politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press 2018). Her work has been published in academic journals such as Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and Perspectives on Politics, as well as The Washington Post, Democracy Journal, and Vox. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America, is a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and is an adjunct fellow at the Niskanen Center. At Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, she is affiliated with the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and Program on Capitalism and Democracy.She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University; as a Marshall Scholar, she studied economic history at Oxford University and politics at the University of Essex. She received a BA in political science from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, her hometown.
Research
Books
The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave—And Why they Don't,, forthcoming (2025), Oxford University Press
Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: The Rise of Programmatic Politics in the United States and Britain. Cambridge University Press (2018)
Review in Perspectives on Politics | Review in Public Administration
Democratization and Parties, Freeman-Spogli Institute World Class Podcast
Selected Writing
What Are Strong Parties? working paper
State Capacity and Public Health: California and COVID-19 (with Andrew Kelly), working paper
Political Parties and Democratic Capitalism, in Democracy and Capitalism, ed. Scott Miller and Sid Milkis (forthcoming, 2025)
Political Parties and Democratic Norms (with Julia Azari), in Placing Political Parties in American Political Development, ed. Jessica Hejny and Adam Hilton (forthcoming, 2025)
Associational Party Building: A Path To Rebuilding Democracy (with Tabatha Abu El-Haj). 2022. Columbia Law Review Forum, vol. 122, 127-76
California and Public Health Authority, in Who Governs? Emergency Powers in the Time of Covid, 2022. Morris Fiorina and John Ferejohn (eds), Hoover University Press.
Democratization and the Franchise, 2020. Comparative Politics 52(3): 515-532
Comparing America: Reflections on Democracy Across Subfields. 2019. Perspectives on Politics 17(3): 788-800
The Contradictions of Democratic Innovation in the United States, in The Governance Report 2017, ed. Hertie School of Governance. Oxford University Press
Illicit Tactics as Substitutes: Election Fraud, Ballot Reform and Contested Congressional Elections in the United States, 1860-1930, (with Jan Teorell). 2017. Comparative Political Studies 50(5): 665-696
Democracy in America (with Nolan McCarty). 2015. Global Politics 6(S1), 49-55
Related Writing
From stakeholder capitalism to state-capacity capitalism, Niskanen Center, 2024
California's Election Reforms Should Be a Model for Other States, 2023, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Why Big Reform Is Possible, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, 2023
Neoliberalism: The Rise and Fall, 2021, American Purpose
Democracy in Peril?, 2020, American Purpose
Civil Society in the Neoliberal Age, 2020, Global Perspectives
The Politics of Post-Pandemic Education, 2021, The Niskanen Center
Patronage and the Pandemic, 2020, The American Interest
Political Reform and American Democracy, 2020, The American Interest
Global Populisms and Their Challenges with Anna Grzymala-Busse, Michael McFaul, and Frank Fukuyama, 2020. Stanford Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies White Paper.
Political Parties: What Are They Good For?, 2019. New America Political Reform Essay Collection.
See also Challenges to Parties in the United States and beyond, Vox.com, 2019.
"How to Fix Liberal Democracy?" Matt Lewis and the News Podcast
Making Better Use of Lessons From Abroad For American Democracy (with Thomas Carothers), 2019, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
The Future of Democratic Capitalism, Winter 2019, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas
Reassessing American Democracy: The Enduring Challenge of Racial Exclusion (with Johanna Kalb). 2018. University of Michigan Law Review Online Vol. 117: 55-62.
see also "Building Inclusive Democracy Through Social Policy," 2018. Symposium on Inclusive Democracy, Protect Democracy and Take CareBlog
The Paradox of Party Polarization, 2017, in The American Interest
Polarization and Partisanship. The American Interest, Nov/Dec 2015
"Culture War? A Closer Look at the Role of Religion, Denomination, and Religiosity in US Public Opinion" (with Shauna Shames and Katherine Levine). In Faith, Politics, and Sexual Diversity, ed. David Rayside and Clyde Wilcox. University of British Columbia Press, 2011.