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.

In The News

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
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
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