American Democracy and the Mid-Term Elections
What’s at stake in this year’s midterm elections? After months of contentious primary races, the 2018 midterms will determine which party controls Congress this January. Join us for a panel discussion featuring Bruce Cain, Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University, and Mirya Holman, Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane University. We will discuss the important campaign issues, the diversity of candidates running, and the role gender issues are playing across the House and Senate races.
Bruce E. Cain
Jerry Yang & Akiko Yamazaki
Environment & Energy Building
473 Via Ortega, First Floor
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-4225
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; and “Redistricting Commissions: A Better Political Buffer?” in The Yale Law Journal, volume 121, 2012. He is currently working on a book about political reform in the US.
Didi Kuo
Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
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) 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.
