One of the hallmarks of successful democratization is programmatic party competition, whereby parties compete for office by offering distinct sets of policies to voters. However, there are signs across the advanced democracies of challenges, or alternatives, to policy competition. Elected officials rely on emotion, anti-system rhetoric, or identity to mobilize voters and make representative claims; further, affectively polarizated voters may care little about policy. This project develops a theory of programmatic decline, conceptualizing it as distinct from the typical programmatic-clientelistic dichotomy in comparative politics. It considers the limitations to programmatic competition, and bridges a gap between the study of party systems (focusing on what parties offer) and political behavior (focusing on how voters make choices). It develop potential indicators and measures of programmatic decline in the United States, with implications for the broader study of policy-based competition and democratic erosion. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

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, 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 (Oxford University Press) 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 was previously 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.