Hakeem Jefferson is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University where he is also a faculty affiliate with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Stanford Center for American Democracy. During the 2021-22 academic year he was also the SAGE Sara Miller McCune Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Hakeem’s work focuses primarily on the role identity plays in structuring political attitudes and behaviors in the U.S. His in-progress book project builds on his award-winning dissertation to consider how Black Americans come to support punitive social policies that target members of their racial group.

In other projects, Hakeem examines the causes of the racial divide in Americans’ reactions to officer-involved shootings; works to evaluate the meaningfulness of key political concepts, like ideological identification among Black Americans; and considers how white Americans navigate an identity that many within the group perceive as increasingly stigmatized. In these and other projects, Hakeem sets out to showcase and clarify the important and complex ways that identity matters across all domains of American life.

A public-facing, justice-oriented scholar, Hakeem is an academic contributor at FiveThirtyEight and his writings and commentary have been featured in places like the New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and other major outlets. He is also active on Twitter, and you can follow him @hakeemjefferson.

Anna Grzymała-Busse is a professor in the Department of Political Science, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the director of The Europe Center. Her research interests include political parties, state development and transformation, informal political institutions, religion and politics, and post-communist politics.

In her first book, Redeeming the Communist Past, she examined the paradox of the communist successor parties in East Central Europe: incompetent as authoritarian rulers of the communist party-state, several then succeeded as democratic competitors after the collapse of these communist regimes in 1989.

Rebuilding Leviathan, her second book project, investigated the role of political parties and party competition in the reconstruction of the post-communist state. Unless checked by a robust competition, democratic governing parties simultaneously rebuilt the state and ensured their own survival by building in enormous discretion into new state institutions.

Anna's third book, Nations Under God, examines why some churches have been able to wield enormous policy influence. Others have failed to do so, even in very religious countries. Where religious and national identities have historically fused, churches gained great moral authority, and subsequently covert and direct access to state institutions. It was this institutional access, rather than either partisan coalitions or electoral mobilization, that allowed some churches to become so powerful.

Anna's most recent book, Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State, argues that the medieval church was a fundamental force in European state formation.

Other areas of interest include informal institutions, the impact of European Union membership on politics in newer member countries, and the role of temporality and causal mechanisms in social science explanations.

Jonathan Rodden is a professor in the political science department at Stanford who works on the comparative political economy of institutions. He has written several articles and three books on federalism and fiscal decentralization. One of those books, Hamilton’s Paradox: The Promise and Peril of Fiscal Federalism, was the recipient of the Gregory Luebbert Prize for the best book in comparative politics in 2007. He works with institutions including the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, USAID, and the European Parliament on issues related to fiscal decentralization and federalism.

He has also written papers on the geographic distribution of political preferences within countries, legislative bargaining, the distribution of budgetary transfers across regions, and the historical origins of political institutions. He has written a series of papers applying tools from mathematics and computer science to questions about redistricting, culminating in a 2019 book called Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide (Basic Books). Rodden has also embarked on an interdisciplinary collaborative project focused on handgun acquisition.

Rodden received his PhD from Yale University and his BA from the University of Michigan, and was a Fulbright student at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 2007, he was the Ford Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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.