Didi Kuo

Didi Kuo

  • Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

Biography

Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

publications

Conference Memos
April 2015

Conference Report: Lobbying and Campaign Finance [November 2014]

Author(s)
cover link Conference Report: Lobbying and Campaign Finance [November 2014]
Conference Memos
October 2014

Conference Report: Comparative Budget Policy: Lessons for Reform in the United States [May 2014]

Author(s)
cover link Conference Report: Comparative Budget Policy: Lessons for Reform in the United States [May 2014]

In The News

Amichai Magen, Marshall Burke, Didi Kuo, Larry Diamond, and Michael McFaul onstage for a panel discussion at Stanford's 2023 Reunion and Homecoming
Commentary

At Reunion Homecoming, FSI Scholars Offer Five Policy Recommendations for the Biden Administration

FSI scholars offer their thoughts on what can be done to address political polarization in the United States, tensions between Taiwan and China, climate change, the war in Ukraine, and the Israel-Hamas war.
cover link At Reunion Homecoming, FSI Scholars Offer Five Policy Recommendations for the Biden Administration
Voter information packets for 2022 midterm elections
Commentary

What to make of the 2022 midterm results and what it might mean for 2024

Some takeaways from the 2022 midterms: surprising, a possible return to normalcy, and a “relief”– of sorts, Stanford scholars say.
cover link What to make of the 2022 midterm results and what it might mean for 2024