School of Humanities and Sciences
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David D. Laitin
James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor
BioDavid D. Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He received his BA from Swarthmore College, and then served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Somalia and Grenada, where he became national tennis champion in 1970. Back in the US, he received his Ph.D. in political science from UC Berkeley, working under the direction of Ernst Haas and Hanna Pitkin.
He has taught at three great universities: UCSD (1975-87), the University of Chicago (1987-1999) and now at Stanford. Over his career, as a student of comparative politics, he has conducted field research in Somalia, Yorubaland (Nigeria), Catalonia (Spain), Estonia, and France, all the time focusing on issues of language and religion, and how these cultural phenomena link nation to state. His books include Politics, Language and Thought: The Somali Experience (1977), Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba (1986), Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa (1992), Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (1998); Nations, States and Violence (2007); Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies (2016); and African Politics Since Independence (2019).
In collaboration with James Fearon, he has published several papers on ethnicity, ethnic cooperation, the sources of civil war, and on policies that work to settle civil wars. Laitin has also collaborated with Alan Krueger on international terrorism and with Eli Berman on suicide terrorism.
In 2008-2009, with support from the National Science Foundation, and with a visiting appointment at Sciences-Po Paris, Laitin conducted ethnographic, survey and experimental research on Muslim integration into France, seeking to assess the magnitude of religious discrimination and isolate the mechanisms that sustain it. In collaboration with Claire Adida and Marie-Anne Valfort, they published the results in Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian Heritage Societies (Harvard Press, 2016).
In 2016, Laitin became co-director of Stanford's Immigration Policy Lab, and has co-authored several papers published in "Science", "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" and "Nature Human Behavior" that estimate the effects of policy on immigrant integration.
Laitin has been a recipient of fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. In 2021 Laitin was the recipient of the John Skytte Prize in Political Science from the Johan Skytte Foundation in Uppsala University, Sweden. -
Paul Lendway
Postdoctoral Scholar, Political Science
BioI study the psychological, informational, and rhetorical underpinnings of polarization in American political behavior. One stream of my research investigates how various forms of political communication (i.e., sermon rhetoric, populist appeals, etc.) shape political preferences. Another strand of my research probes the role of information (i.e., information about social movements or inequality) in structuring public opinion and policy preferences. A final line of my research explores solutions to mass polarization. This includes a project that tests Americans' willingness to compromise on a series of multi-dimensional policy tradeoffs (i.e., a conservative immigration policy and a liberal abortion policy, etc.).
My research is published in American Politics Research, Environmental Politics, and the Yale Journal of International Affairs. My research on sermon rhetoric and White evangelical support for the Republican Party has an R&R at Political Behavior, and my research probing the effect of populist appeals on democratic backsliding also has an R&R at Political Behavior. I have presented my research at a wide range of organizations, including the American Political Science Association, Harvard University, Princeton University, and Yale University. Funding for my research has been provided by the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, and other organizations.
