Avidit Acharya
Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Professor of Political Science and (by courtesy) of Political Economics, Graduate School of Business
Project: Voter Ideology and Electoral Reform in the United States
This project studies the theoretical properties of certain reforms that have been proposed for American elections, including ranked choice voting, approval voting, and Condorcet methods. The focus is on whether such reforms can be expected to reduce political extremism, increase voter engagement, and enhance accountability. I analyze the properties of these voting systems under more realistic assumptions about voting behavior than those that are traditionally made in social choice and game theoretic analyses of these voting systems.
Russell Berman
Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities, Stanford, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
Project: University Activism and Campus Disruption in the Wake of October 7, 2023
This project examines the wave of protests that have disrupted higher education since the Hamas attacks on Israel. Preliminary data analyses suggest greater likelihood of protests in selective institutions, urban locations, and red states. There is evidence of a gender gap, with greater participation by women, and subject-matter gap, with less activism at schools with greater STEM focus.
Michael Hartney
Bruni Family Fellow, Hoover Institution
Project: The Causes and Consequences of Declining Confidence in the Public Schools
Professors Hartney and Paul Peterson will study the sources and implications of Americans’ declining confidence in K–12 public education. Drawing on long-running Gallup and YouGov surveys, their work explores how partisanship, institutional performance, and broader attitudes toward government shape citizens’ trust in their public schools, with the goal of informing future research and policy discussions about restoring confidence in this vital civic institution.
Jake Jares
Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, and Assistant Professor of Political Science, Texas A&M University
Project: The Political Economy of Immigration Enforcement: Mass and Elite Representation amid Policy-Induced Labor Shortages
This project examines changes in state immigration laws to investigate how American legislative institutions navigate competing constituent demands when enforcement policies trigger labor shortages. Leveraging variation in labor intensity across crop types, we employ difference-in-differences and triple-difference designs to trace how affected agribusinesses mobilized politically and how legislators balanced pro-enforcement voters against economically distressed farm interests. By linking large-scale, farm-level planting data with campaign finance records, voter files, and measures of legislative behavior, we shed light on institutional responsiveness when mass policy preferences and business interests collide.
Rebecca Lester
Hoover Fellow, Hoover Institution, and Associate Professor, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Project: Taxpayer Awareness and Perceptions of Tax Cuts: Evidence from Hawai’i
Governments around the world reduce taxes to advance policy objectives, change the distribution of tax burdens, and increase favor among constituents. However, little is known about how taxpayers become aware of these tax reductions and whether awareness affects taxpayers’ beliefs and perceptions. We collaborate with the Hawaii Department of Taxation to implement a randomized letter campaign targeted at Hawaii taxpayers, which we supplement with a follow-up survey. We find that informational letters from the Hawaii tax authority double taxpayer awareness as compared to the control group of taxpayers who did not receive a letter. We also find awareness improves perceptions of affordability and tax fairness in the state. Our results suggest that direct informational outreach by tax agencies can be an effective tool to substantially increase awareness and shape perceptions of fiscal policy.
Elizabeth Elder and Hans Lueders
Hoover Fellows, Hoover Institution
Project: Polarization Beyond the Rural-Urban Dichotomy
American political and public discourse often portrays urban and rural areas as fundamentally distinct across economic and cultural dimensions. This project seeks to reevaluate this urban-rural divide in American politics by leveraging observational and survey data to identify both key differences and overlooked commonalities. In doing so, we advance scholarly debates on geographic polarization and inform efforts to overcome spatial divides and promote civic solidarity and trust in American democracy.
Robb Willer
Professor, Sociology, Psychology (by courtesy), and the Graduate School of Business (by courtesy), Stanford University
Project: Reducing Partisan Animosity to Restore Trust in American Institutions
This project investigates how two key factors—partisan animosity (the negative feelings many Americans harbor toward supporters of the opposing party) and perceptions that major institutions are controlled by rival partisans—contribute to mistrust in American institutions. It further evaluates whether reducing partisan animosity can effectively restore thoughtful, evidence-based trust, even when individuals continue to perceive those institutions as politically slanted.
Jonathan Due
Veteran Fellow, Hoover Institution, and Executive Director, Center for Military Transition, Raymond A. Mason School of Business, William & Mary
Project: Flourishing After Service: Addressing Veteran Underemployment and Empowering Those Who Served to Maximize their Productivity, Resilience, and Fulfillment
My research focuses on veteran underemployment. Specifically, this research effort seeks to shift the prevailing conversation on veteran transition and employment. The project consists of a comprehensive research effort designed to support a public conversation that addresses the root causes of veteran underemployment and prepares actionable policy and programmatic interventions to better inform military transition programs and veteran employment support.
Jacob Light
Hoover Fellow, Hoover Institution
Project: Political Polarization in University Courses
This project introduces an embedding-based framework for quantifying the political and partisan content of text. Applied to a corpus of course descriptions from over one thousand US colleges and universities, the analysis traces trends in the politicization and partisan slant of college curricula and examines the relative influence of distinct university stakeholders in driving these trends.
Patricia Gumport
Professor of Education, Graduate School of Education, Stanford
Project: Public Impact Research: Contemporary Challenges in University Knowledge Making
American research universities have been expanding public impact research initiatives across a range of academic fields and problem areas, creating organizational forms and resources to facilitate this research. A robust qualitative dataset is examined to understand the opportunities envisioned, the challenges, and the outcomes thus far. A key line of analysis is to understand how faculty researchers and staff experience the institutional conditions that facilitate or inhibit impact-oriented research. The Center for Revitalizing American Institutions (RAI) seed grant is funding a research assistant to work with the principal investigator on part of the analysis.
Diego Zambrano
Associate Dean for Global Programs and Professor of Law, Stanford Law School
Project: Culture and Private Enforcement of Public Regulation
The United States is a clear outlier among democracies in its reliance on private litigation to enforce public regulation, empowering individual citizens as "private attorneys general," yet the reasons for this American distinctiveness remain poorly understood. This project examines the theory that culture is the root cause, using comparative survey experiments with approximately two thousand respondents in the United States and Canada to test whether American values like individualism, distrust of government, and faith in litigation explain this preference—or whether other factors like political ideology and legal traditions have greater explanatory power. By understanding how legal institutions can better align with the cultural values of the communities they serve, we advance scholarly debates on American legal culture and inform efforts to design public regulations that enhance institutional legitimacy and rebuild public trust in democratic institutions.
