Brandice Canes-Wrone is a professor in the political science department and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. She is also the director of the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions. Her current research focuses on representation and accountability, including projects on elections, campaign finance, and representation.

During the course of her career, Canes-Wrone has published numerous articles and books in the areas of political institutions, mass political behavior, and political economy. On political institutions, she has a longstanding interest in executive politics. Her book Who Leads Whom? Presidents, Policy, and Public (University of Chicago, 2006) was awarded the Richard E. Neustadt prize by the American Political Science Association for the best book on the US presidency that year. More recent scholarship involves comparative analysis of how institutional constraints on the executive are associated with economic performance.

Other current research focuses on accountability and representation in the US context. She coedited Accountability Reconsidered: Voters, Interests, and Information in US Policymaking (Cambridge University Press, 2023) with Chuck Cameron, Sandy Gordon, and Greg Huber, and in this volume, she and Michael Kistner examine how changes in the US local media are associated with developments in congressional electoral accountability. Additionally, she has a series of recent publications on campaign finance, including on the motivations of campaign donors (with Michael Barber and Sharece Thrower), congressional members’ responsiveness to donors (with Kenneth Miller, and in separate work, Nathan Gibson), and comparing the attitudes of donors to other constituencies (with Michael Barber, Josh Clinton, and Greg Huber).

Canes-Wrone is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served on the editorial boards of numerous political science and political economy journals. She has also served on the boards of the American National Elections Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, and the Presidents and Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, including as President of this section.

Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, Canes-Wrone was on the faculties of MIT, Northwestern, and Princeton. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from Princeton and a PhD from Stanford.

Justin Grimmer is the Morris M. Doyle Centennial Professor in Public Policy in Stanford University's Department of Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Co-Director of the Democracy and Polarization Lab. His current research focuses on American political institutions, elections, and developing new machine-learning methods for the study of politics.

His research examines how representation occurs in US politics using new statistical methods. His first book, Representational Style in Congress: What Legislators Say and Why It Matters (Cambridge University Press, 2013), shows how senators define the type of representation they provide constituents and how this affects constituents’ evaluations. The book was awarded the Fenno Prize in 2014 for best book published about Congress. His second book, The Impression of Influence: Legislator Communication, Representation, and Democratic Accountability (Princeton University Press, 2014, with Sean J. Westwood and Solomon Messing), demonstrates how legislators ensure they receive credit for government actions.

His current research projects include a book project on text as data methods for the social sciences, an examination of how electoral rules affect political participation, and an analysis of how social media affect democracies. His previous work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Regulation and Governance, and several top computer science publication outlets.

He holds a PhD from Harvard University and an AB from Wabash College.

Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He is a senior consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy, where he served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad.  A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).

During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.

Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.