Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Her research interests include democratization, political parties, state-building, and the political economy of representation. At Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), she oversees the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective, which seeks to bridge academic and policy research on American democracy. She is completing a book on the erosion of political parties, under contract with Oxford University Press.
She is the author of Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the Rise of Programmatic Politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press 2018). Her work been published in academic journals such as Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and Perspectives on Politics, as well as The Washington Post, Democracy Journal, and Vox. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America, is a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and is an adjunct fellow at the Niskanen Center.
She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University; as a Marshall Scholar, she studied economic history at Oxford University and politics at the University of Essex. She received a BA in political science from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, her hometown.