Book Launch | The Great Retreat, by Didi Kuo
Once a centralizing force of the democratic process, political parties have eroded over the past fifty years. In her new book, The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don't, Didi Kuo explores the development of political parties as democracy expanded across the West in the nineteenth century. While parties have become professionalized and nationalized, they have lost the robust organizational density that made them effective representatives. After the Cold War, the combination of a neoliberal economic consensus, changes to campaign finance, and shifting party priorities weakened the party systems of Western democracies. In order for democracy to adapt to a new era of global capitalism, The Great Retreat makes the case for stronger parties in the form of socially embedded institutions with deep connections to communities and citizens.
Kuo will give a brief talk about the book before being joined by Jake Grumbach, Julia Azari, and Bruce Cain for a panel discussion.
speakers
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. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave - and Why They Don't (Oxford University Press, 2025) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the Rise of Programmatic Politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018). 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.
Jake Grumbach
Jake Grumbach is an associate professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. He was previously associate professor of political science at the University of Washington and a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton.
He studies the political economy of the United States, with interests in democratic institutions, labor, federalism, racial and economic inequality, and statistical methods. His book, Laboratories Against Democracy (Princeton University Press 2022), investigates the causes and consequences of the nationalization of state politics.
Before graduate school, he earned a B.A. from Columbia University and worked as a public health researcher. Outside of academia, he's a nerd for 70s funk/soul and 90s hip hop, as well as a Warriors fan.
Julia Azari
Julia Azari is Professor of Political Science at Marquette University. An active public-facing scholar, she has published commentary on presidential and party politics in FiveThirtyEight, Politico, Vox, The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC, and The Guardian.
Her scholarly work has appeared in journals such as The Forum, Perspectives on Politics, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Foreign Affairs, and Social Science History. She has contributed invited chapters to books published by the University Press of Kansas, University of Pennsylvania Press, Cambridge University Press, and University of Edinburgh Press. Azari is the author of Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate (Cornell, 2014), coeditor of The Presidential Leadership Dilemma (SUNY, 2013), and co-editor of The Trump Legacy (under contract, University Press of Kansas).
Bruce Cain
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 to 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.
In-person: William J. Perry Conference Room (Encina Hall, 2nd floor, 616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford)
Online: Via Zoom
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.
