Didi Kuo

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

Journal Articles
September 2023

Why Big Reform Is Possible

Author(s)
cover link Why Big Reform Is Possible
Journal Articles
November 2022

Associational Party-Building: A Path to Rebuilding Democracy

Author(s)
cover link Associational Party-Building: A Path to Rebuilding Democracy
Journal Articles
June 2020

Reassessing American Democracy: The Enduring Challenge of Racial Exclusion

Author(s)
cover link Reassessing American Democracy: The Enduring Challenge of Racial Exclusion

In The News

Hakeem Jefferson, Didi Kuo, Jonathan Rodden, and Anna Grzymala-Busse
News

Diversity and Democracy: Navigating the Complexities of the 2024 Election

The third of four panels of the “America Votes 2024” series examined the tension surrounding diversity and inclusion in the upcoming election. The panel featured Stanford scholars Hakeem Jefferson, Didi Kuo, Jonathan Rodden, and Anna Grzymala-Busse.
cover link Diversity and Democracy: Navigating the Complexities of the 2024 Election
Politics illustration
News

How political parties have changed over time

A number of factors have led to political parties getting weaker. Stanford political scientist Didi Kuo explains why and what implications this could have for 2024 and beyond.
cover link How political parties have changed over time
Didi Kuo and Andrew S. Kelly with APSA logo
News

Didi Kuo and Co-author Andrew S. Kelly Awarded 2023 Leonard S. Robins Award for Best Paper on Health Politics and Policy

The award recognizes Kuo and Kelly's paper, “State Capacity and Public Health: California and COVID-19,” as the best paper on health politics and policy presented at the 2022 American Political Science Association (APSA) conference.
cover link Didi Kuo and Co-author Andrew S. Kelly Awarded 2023 Leonard S. Robins Award for Best Paper on Health Politics and Policy