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

Reports
January 2024

Political Parties Are Essential Democratic Institutions

Author(s)
cover link Political Parties Are Essential Democratic Institutions
Journal Articles
September 2023

Why Big Reform Is Possible

Author(s)
cover link Why Big Reform Is Possible
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
[Left to right]: Michael McFaul, Marshall Burke, Steven Pifer, Oriana Skylar Mastro, Didi Kuo, and Amichai Magen on stage.
Commentary

Five Things FSI Scholars Want You to Know About the Threats Our World Is Facing

At a panel during Stanford's 2024 Reunion weekend, scholars from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies shared what their research says about climate change, global democracy, Russia and Ukraine, China, and the Middle East.
cover link Five Things FSI Scholars Want You to Know About the Threats Our World Is Facing
Hoover Tower at sunset.
Commentary

‘Still a close and hard-fought election’: Stanford experts react to presidential candidate changes

Democratic candidate Kamala Harris is set to face Donald Trump in the next presidential debate on Tuesday. With President Biden out of the race, professors expect higher voter turnout but an equally fierce competition during the 2024 election.
cover link ‘Still a close and hard-fought election’: Stanford experts react to presidential candidate changes