This November, Americans will vote in midterm elections for Congressional and state offices.
Join CDDRL's Bruce Cain, Hakeem Jefferson, and Didi Kuo in a discussion on the midterms. This panel will delve into the issues at stake in these elections, including the economy, abortion rights, and President Biden's policy agenda. It will discuss the ongoing influence of President Trump in the Republican Party, and the role of the Big Lie in campaigns for state offices. The panel will also discuss the implications of these elections for democracy, both at home and abroad.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Bruce E. Cain is a Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. He received a BA from Bowdoin College (1970), a B Phil. from Oxford University (1972) as a Rhodes Scholar, and a Ph D from Harvard University (1976). He taught at Caltech (1976-89) and UC Berkeley (1989-2012) before coming to Stanford. Professor Cain was Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley from 1990-2007 and Executive Director of the UC Washington Center from 2005-2012. He was elected the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000 and has won awards for his research (Richard F. Fenno Prize, 1988), teaching (Caltech 1988 and UC Berkeley 2003) and public service (Zale Award for Outstanding Achievement in Policy Research and Public Service, 2000). His areas of expertise include political regulation, applied democratic theory, representation and state politics. Some of Professor Cain’s most recent publications include “Malleable Constitutions: Reflections on State Constitutional Design,” coauthored with Roger Noll in University of Texas Law Review, volume 2, 2009; “More or Less: Searching for Regulatory Balance,” in Race, Reform and the Political Process, edited by Heather Gerken, Guy Charles and Michael Kang, CUP, 2011; “Redistricting Commissions: A Better Political Buffer?” in The Yale Law Journal, volume 121, 2012; and Democracy More or Less (CUP, 2015). He is currently working on problems of environmental governance.
Hakeem Jefferson is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University where he also is a faculty affiliate with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Stanford Center for American Democracy. He received his PhD in political science from the University of Michigan and a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and African American Studies from the University of South Carolina.
His research focuses primarily on the role identity plays in structuring political attitudes and behaviors in the U.S. He is especially interested in understanding how stigma shapes the politics of Black Americans, particularly as it relates to group members’ support for racialized punitive social policies. In other research projects, Hakeem examines the psychological and social roots of the racial divide in Americans’ reactions to officer-involved shootings and work to evaluate the meaningfulness of key political concepts, like ideological identification, among Black Americans.
Hakeem’s dissertation, "Policing Norms: Punishment and the Politics of Respectability Among Black Americans," was a co-winner of the 2020 Best Dissertation Award from the Political Psychology Section of the American Political Science Association.
Didi Kuo is Senior Research Scholar and Associate Director for Research at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. Her research interests include democratization, political parties, and political reform. She oversees the
Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective, which seeks to bridge academic and policy research on American democracy. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America, and is the author of Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the Rise of Programmatic Politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press 2018).
Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to the Philippines Room C330 in Encina Hall may attend in person.
