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Politics & Public Opinion

Politics, Institutions, and Public Opinion

The Hoover fellowship regularly analyzes the political environment shaping government leaders’ decision making, on issues ranging from the economy and national security to public health, education, and the environment. The Institution also conducts two bi-annual polls that measure voters’ attitudes toward social, economic, and political institutions, reactions to specific government policies, and beliefs about the direction of America.

Featured Research
RAI event
news
The Center For Revitalizing American Institutions Launches With Conference
December 5, 2023

via Hoover Daily Report

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Working Papers
How Election Rules Affect Who Wins
June 29, 2023 By Justin Grimmer , Eitan Hersh

via Eitan Hersh

learn more
The group of multiracial people stand and raise their hand to say the pledge.
Essays

The State of American Citizenship 2023

We are troubled but unsurprised by fresh evidence of American civic decline, evidence that comes from an August 2023 survey conducted by YouGov on behalf of the Working Group on Good American…

March 31, 2024 By Chester E. Finn Jr. , Jedaiah Ngalande

via Analysis

Books
Accountability Reconsidered: Voters, Interests, and Information in US Policymaking
February 16, 2023 By Brandice Canes-Wrone , Charles M. Cameron , Sanford C. Gordon , Gregory A. Huber

via Cambridge University Press

Working Papers
Out-of-District Donors and Representation in the US House
April 3, 2021 By Brandice Canes-Wrone , Kenneth M. Miller

via Legislative Studies Quarterly

Articles
Who Governs? Emergency Powers in the Time of COVID
September 6, 2022 By Morris P. Fiorina
Fellows in this Policy Area
Paul Peterson Hoover Headshot

Paul E. Peterson

Senior Fellow (adjunct)
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Paul Peterson Hoover Headshot

Paul E. Peterson

Senior Fellow (adjunct)

Paul E. Peterson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is a member of the Hoover Education Success Initiative, which focuses on the improvement of education policy and provides public education solutions for state education and policy leaders. He is also Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he directs the Program on Education Policy and Governance and is senior editor of Education Next: A Journal of Opinion and Research.  In addition to education policy, Peterson’s research interests include federalism, social capital, and charter schools. He has evaluated the effectiveness of school vouchers and other education reform initiatives, and he has identified both the closure of social and ethnic gaps over the past fifty years and growth in student performance, particularly among charter schools. Peterson is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education. He is a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship;  the Woodrow Wilson Award from the American Political Science Association for the best book published in government or international relations; and the Walton Family Foundation Prize for Best Academic Paper on School Choice and Reform, awarded by the Economics and Finance Policy Association.  The Editorial Projects in Education Research Center reported that Peterson’s studies on school choice and vouchers were among the country’s most influential studies of education policy. Peterson’s recent books include Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning and, with Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann,  Endangering Prosperity: A Global View of the American School.

Peter Berkowitz Hoover Headshot

Peter Berkowitz

Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow
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Peter Berkowitz Hoover Headshot

Peter Berkowitz

Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. In 2019-2021, he served as the Director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, executive secretary of the department's Commission on Unalienable Rights, and senior adviser to the Secretary of State. He is a 2017 recipient of the Bradley Prize. He is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. He serves as director of studies for The Public Interest Fellowship. He is the author of Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-Government, and Political Moderation (Hoover Institution Press, 2013); Israel and the Struggle over the International Laws of War (Hoover Institution Press, 2012); Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton University Press, 1999); and Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist (Harvard University Press, 1995). He is the editor of seven collections of essays on political ideas and institutions published by the Hoover Institution: Renewing the American Constitutional Tradition (2014); Future Challenges in National Security and Law (2010); The Future of American Intelligence (2005); Terrorism, the Laws of War, and the Constitution: Debating the Enemy Combatant Cases (2005); Varieties of Conservatism in America (2004); Varieties of Progressivism in America (2004); and Never a Matter of Indifference: Sustaining Virtue in a Free Republic (2003). He has written hundreds of articles, essays and reviews on a range of subjects for a variety of publications, including The American Interest, the American Political Science Review, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Claremont Review of Books, Commentary, First Things, Forbes.com, Haaretz, The Jerusalem Post, the London Review of Books, National Journal, National Review, The New Criterion, The New Republic, Policy Review, Politico, The Public Interest, the Times Literary Supplement, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, The Wilson Quarterly, and the Yale Law Journal. In addition to teaching regularly in the United States and Israel, Dr. Berkowitz has led seminars on the principles of freedom and the American constitutional tradition for students from Burma at the George W. Bush Presidential Center and for Korean students at Underwood International College at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. He taught constitutional law and jurisprudence at George Mason University School of Law from 1999 to 2006, and political philosophy in the department of government at Harvard University from 1990 to 1999. He holds a JD and a PhD in political science from Yale University; an MA in philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and a BA in English literature from Swarthmore College.

Barry Weingast Hoover Headshot

Barry R. Weingast

Senior Fellow
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Barry Weingast Hoover Headshot

Barry R. Weingast

Senior Fellow

Barry R. Weingast is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. He received a BS from the University of California, Santa Cruz (mathematics, 1974), and completed his PhD in economics at Caltech (1977). Weingast served as chair of Stanford’s Department of Political Science from 1996 through 2001. Weingast is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has won numerous awards, including the James L. Barr Memorial Prize in Public Economics, the Duncan Black Prize for the best paper of the year on public choice (with Kenneth Shepsle), the Heinz Eulau Prize for best paper in the American Political Science Review (with Kenneth Shepsle), the Mary Parker Follett Prize for the best paper in politics and history (twice, once with Charles Stewart); the Distinguished Scholar Award in Public Policy from the Martin School of Public Policy at the University of Kentucky, the Franklin L. Burdette Pi Sigma Alpha Award (with Kenneth Schultz), and the William H. Riker Prize in recognition of scholarly achievement in political science. Weingast has written extensively on the political economy of development, federalism, legal institutions and the rule of law, and democracy. He is author of Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (with Douglass North and John Wallis, 2009, Cambridge University Press) Editor (with Donald Wittman) of The Handbook of Political Economy (Oxford University Press, 2006) “The Industrial Organization of Congress” (with William Marshall), Journal of Political Economy (1988) "Structure and Process, Politics and Policy: Administrative Arrangements and the Political Control of Agencies" (with Mathew McCubbins and Roger Noll) Virginia Law Review (1989) "Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in 17th Century England" (with Douglass North), Journal of Economic History (1989) "The Economic Role of Political Institutions: Market-Preserving Federalism and Economic Development," Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization (1995) “The Political Foundations of Democracy and the Rule of Law," American Political Science Review (1997) "Second Generation Fiscal Federalism: The Implications of Fiscal Incentives," Journal of Urban Economics (2009)

Brandice Canes-Wrone

Brandice Canes-Wrone

Maurice R. Greenberg Senior Fellow | Director of the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions
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Brandice Canes-Wrone

Brandice Canes-Wrone

Maurice R. Greenberg Senior Fellow | Director of the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions

Brandice Canes-Wrone is the Maurice R. Greenberg Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor in the Political Science department at Stanford. Canes-Wrone is the founding director of the Hoover Institution Center for Revitalizing American Institutions. Her current research focuses on representation and accountability, including projects on elections, campaign finance, and populism. She also writes on the effects of political phenomena on economic outcomes. During the course of her career, Canes-Wrone has published numerous articles and books on political institutions, mass political behavior, and political economy. Her book Who Leads Whom? Presidents, Policy, and Public (University of Chicago, 2006) examines how US presidents leverage public opinion to influence policy and how they respond to public opinion in their policy choices. This work was awarded the 2007 Richard E. Neustadt Book Award by the American Political Science Association for the best book on the US presidency. Her more recent scholarship on executive politics investigates how patterns of populism across the globe relate to the institutional features of the office of the chief executive. Other current research focuses on accountability and representation in the US context. She coedited Accountability Reconsidered: Voters, Interests, and Information in US Policymaking (Cambridge, forthcoming, 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) and congressional members’ responsiveness to donors (with Kenneth Miller and, in separate work, Nathan Gibson). Canes-Wrone has been elected to 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, for which she served as president, of the American Political Science Association. 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.

Jonathan Rodden Hoover Headshot

Jonathan Rodden

Senior Fellow
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Jonathan Rodden Hoover Headshot

Jonathan Rodden

Senior Fellow

Jonathan Rodden is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor in the political science department at Stanford. Rodden was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, 2006–7, and a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow, 2010–12. He has written several articles and a pair of books on federalism and fiscal decentralization. His most recent book, Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide (Basic Books, 2019), Rodden demonstrates the left's electoral challenges have deeper roots in economic and political geography. He frequently works with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on issues related to fiscal decentralization. His research focuses on the comparative political economy of institutions. Rodden 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 is currently writing a series of articles and a book on political geography and the drawing of electoral districts around the world. Rodden received his PhD in political science 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.

Morris Fiorina Hoover Headshot

Morris P. Fiorina

Senior Fellow
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Morris Fiorina Hoover Headshot

Morris P. Fiorina

Senior Fellow

Morris P. Fiorina is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wendt Family Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. His current research focuses on elections and public opinion with particular attention to the quality of representation: how well the positions of elected officials reflect the preferences of the public. During the course of his forty-year career Fiorina has published numerous articles and books on national politics including Congress—Keystone of the Washington Establishment (Yale University Press, 1977), Retrospective Voting in American National Elections (Yale University Press, 1981), and Divided Government (Allyn & Bacon, 1992). The Personal Vote: Constituency Service and Electoral Independence, coauthored with Bruce Cain and John Ferejohn (Harvard University Press, 1987), won the 1988 Richard F. Fenno Prize. He is also coeditor of Continuity and Change in House Elections (Stanford University Press and Hoover Press, 2000). The third edition of his 2004 groundbreaking book Culture War: The Myth of a Polarized America (with Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope) was published in 2011. He coedited Can We Talk? The Rise of Rude, Nasty, Stubborn Politics (Pearson, 2013). Most recently he published Unstable Majorities (Hoover, 2017).  Fiorina has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. He has served on the editorial boards of more than a dozen journals on political science, law, political economy, and public policy. From 1986 to 1990 he was chairman of the Board of Overseers of the American National Election Studies. Fiorina received his BA degree from Allegheny College and his MA and PhD from the University of Rochester. He lives in Portola Valley, California.

Terry Moe

Terry M. Moe

Senior Fellow
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Terry Moe

Terry M. Moe

Senior Fellow

Terry M. Moe is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the William Bennett Munro Professor of political science at Stanford University. He has written extensively on the presidency and public bureaucracy as well as political institutions more generally, publishing many scholarly articles on these topics.  His most recent books are Relic: How Our Constitution Undermines Effective Government--And Why We Need a More Powerful Presidency (with William Howell, 2016), and Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy (with William Howell, 2020). He has also written extensively on the politics of American education.  His most recent books are The Politics of Institutional Reform: Katrina, Education, and the Second Face of Power (2019), The Comparative Politics of Education: Teachers Unions and Education Systems Around the World (edited with Susanne Wiborg, 2017), and Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools (2011). His prior work on education includes Politics, Markets, and America's Schools (1990) and Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education (2009), both with John E. Chubb, and Schools, Vouchers, and the American Public (2001).

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Justin Grimmer

Senior Fellow
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Justin Grimmer

Senior Fellow

Justin Grimmer is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. 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.

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