School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 51-74 of 74 Results
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Josiah Ober
Markos & Eleni Kounalakis Chair in Honor of Constantine Mitsotakis, Professor of Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Professor of Classics and, by courtesy, of Philosophy
BioJosiah Ober, the Constantine Mitsotakis Chair in the School of Humanities and Sciences, specializes in the areas of ancient and modern political theory and historical institutionalism. His primary appointment is in Political Science; he holds a secondary appointment in the Classics and courtesy appointments in Philosophy and the Hoover Institution. His most recent books are The Greeks and the Rational: The discovery of practical reason (University of CaliforniaPress 2022) and Demopolis: Democracy before liberalism in theory and practice Cambridge University Press 2017). His ongoing work focuses on rationality (ancient and modern), the theory and practice of democracy, and the politics of knowledge and innovation, Recent articles and working papers address AI ethics, socio-political systems, economic growth and inequality, the relationship between democracy and dignity, and the aggregation of expertise.
He is author or co-author of about 100 articles and chapters (many available on his Academia.edu page) and several other books, including Fortress Attica (1985), Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989), The Athenian Revolution (1996), Political Dissent in Democratic Athens (1998), Athenian Legacies 2005), Democracy and Knowledge (2008), and The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (2015). He has held residential fellowships at the National Humanities Center, Center for Hellenic Studies, Univ. of New England (Australia), Clare Hall (Cambridge), Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences , and Univ. of Sydney; research fellowships from the ACLS, NEH, and Guggenheim; and has been a visiting professor at University of Michigan, Paris I-Sorbonne, UC-Irvine, and UC-Berkeley. Before coming to Stanford he taught at Montana State University (1980-1990) and Princeton University (1990-2006). -
Jean Oi
William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsPolitical economy and the process of reform in transitional systems, with particular focus on corporate restructuring and fiscal politics. Oi’s new project empirically assess the impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) by taking an institutional and micro-level approach to identify the key players and their interests. Is the BRI is a tightly coordinated central state effort, as some assert, or another example of local state development taking advantage of global opportunities?
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Simone Paci
Lecturer, Political Science
BioSimone Paci is a quantitative social scientist whose research and teaching spans political economy topics across public policy domains. His main three areas of research include taxation, AI, and gender politics.
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Jennifer Pan
Sir Robert Ho Tung Professor of Chinese Studies, Professor of Communication, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and of Sociology
BioJennifer Pan studies political communication, digital media, and authoritarian politics, with a focus on China. She is the Sir Robert Ho Tung Professor of Chinese Studies, Professor of Communication, and, by courtesy, Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford University, where she is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute.
Using experimental and computational methods with large-scale data on political activity, she examines how technology structures censorship, propaganda, and information manipulation, and how preferences and behaviors are shaped as a result. She is the author of Welfare for Autocrats (Oxford University Press, 2020), and her work has appeared in journals including American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Science, and Nature.
She graduated from Princeton University, summa cum laude, and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University’s Department of Government. -
Nathaniel Persily
James B. McClatchy Professor, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Communication and of Political Science
BioNate Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and the Co-Director of the Stanford Law AI Initiative. He also holds appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies. Professor Persily’s work focuses on two distinct areas: the Law of Democracy and Governance of Technology. He is coauthor with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, Richard Pildes and Franita Tolson of the casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 6th ed., 2020), which addresses issues such as voting rights, political party regulation, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. He also served as the nonpartisan Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the governance of technology and technology’s impact on democracy. He is coeditor, with Joshua Tucker, of Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field and Prospects for Reform (Cambridge Press, 2020), and Artificial Intelligence, Politics, and Political Science (Cambridge Press, 2026). He is also co-editor of the Digitalist Papers: Artificial Intelligence and Democracy in America (2024) with Erik Brynjolfsson, Alex Pentland and Condoleeza Rice. Professor Persily cochairs the Presidential Task Force on Artificial Intelligence of the American Political Science Association. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.
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Lowry Pressly
Assistant Professor of Political Science
BioLowry is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford.
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Soledad Artiz Prillaman
Assistant Professor of Political Science
BioSoledad Artiz Prillaman is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. Her research lies at the intersections of comparative political economy, development, and gender, with a focus in South Asia. Specifically, her research addresses questions such as: What are the political consequences of development and development policies, particularly for women’s political behavior? How are minorities, specifically women, democratically represented and where do inequalities in political engagement persist and how are voter demands translated into policy and governance? In answering these questions, she utilizes mixed methods, including field experiments, surveys, and in-depth qualitative fieldwork. She received her Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University in 2017 and a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from Texas A&M University in 2011.
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Rob Reich
McGregor-Girand Professor of Social Ethics of Science and Technology, Sr Fellow at the Stanford Institute for HAI, Professor, by courtesy, of Education, of Philosophy, of Law and Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute
BioRob Reich is the McGregor-Girand Professor of Social Ethics of Science and Technology at Stanford University. In 2024-25, Rob was on public service leave as Senior Advisor to the United States Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute.
His scholarship in political theory engages with the work of social scientists and engineers. His newest work is on governance of frontier science and technology. His most recent books are System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot (with Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein, HarperCollins 2021) and Digital Technology and Democratic Theory (edited with Lucy Bernholz and Hélène Landemore, University of Chicago Press 2021). He has also written widely about philanthropy, including Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better (Princeton University Press, 2018) and Philanthropy in Democratic Societies: History, Institutions, Values (edited with Chiara Cordelli and Lucy Bernholz, University of Chicago Press, 2016). His early work is focused on democracy and education, including Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Education, Justice, and Democracy (edited with Danielle Allen, University of Chicago Press, 2013). He has testified before Congress and written widely for the public, including for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wired, Time Magazine, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Rob is the recipient of multiple teaching awards, including the Walter J. Gores award, Stanford’s highest honor for teaching. He was a sixth grade teacher at Rusk Elementary School in Houston, Texas before attending graduate school. He is a board member of the magazine Boston Review and at the Spencer Foundation. He helped to create the global movement #GivingTuesday and served as its inaugural board chair. -
Douglas Rivers
Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
BioDouglas Rivers is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of political science at Stanford University. He is the president and CEO of YouGov/Polimetrix.
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Jonathan Rodden
Professor of Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
BioJonathan 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 inter-disciplinary 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.
Other Affiliation:
Director of the Spatial Social Science Lab at Stanford -
Scott D. Sagan
Caroline S. G. Munro Memorial Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsJust War doctrine and the development of norms concerning the use of force; public attitudes in the U.S., U.K., France, and Israel about the use of nuclear weapons and non-combatant casualties; organizations and management of insider threats; the management of hazardous technology; security of nuclear materials, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
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Debra Satz
Vernon R. and Lysbeth Warren Anderson Dean of the School of H&S, The Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society and Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
Current Research and Scholarly Interestspolitical philosophy,ethics and economics, equality
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Kenneth Schultz
William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science
BioKenneth A. Schultz is William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. His research examines international conflict and conflict resolution. He is the author of Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy and World Politics: Interests, Interactions, and Institutions (with David Lake and Jeffry Frieden), as well as numerous articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. He was the recipient the 2003 Karl Deutsch Award, given by the International Studies Association, and a 2025 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching, awarded by Stanford University. He received his PhD in political science from Stanford University.
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Paul Sniderman
Emeritus Faculty, Academic Council, Political Science
BioPaul M. Sniderman is the Fairleigh S. Dickinson Jr. Professor in Public Policy.
Sniderman’s research focuses on multiculturalism and politics in Western Europe and spatial reasoning.
He coauthored The Struggle for Inclusion: Muslims and Liberal Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2020) with Elisabeth Ivarsflaten.
He has published many other books, including When Ways of Life Collide: Multiculturalism and Its Discontents in the Netherlands (Princeton University Press, 2007) with Louk Hagendoorn, Reasoning and Choice, The Scar of Race, Reaching beyond Race, The Outsider, and Black Pride and Black Prejudice, in addition to a plethora of articles. He initiated the use of computer-assisted interviewing to combine randomized experiments and general population survey research.
A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he has been awarded the Woodrow Wilson Prize, 1992; the Franklin L. Burdette Pi Sigma Alpha Award, 1994; an award for the Outstanding Book on the Subject of Human Rights from the Gustavus Meyers Center, 1994; the Gladys M. Kammerer Award, 1998; the Pi Sigma Alpha Award; and the Ralph J. Bunche Award, 2003.
Sniderman received his B.A. degree (philosophy) from the University of Toronto and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. -
Michael Tomz
William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
BioMichael Tomz is the William Bennett Munro Professor in Political Science at Stanford University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Center on Global Poverty and Development, and the Landreth Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.
Tomz has published in the fields of international relations, American politics, comparative politics, and statistical methods. He is the author of Reputation and International Cooperation: Sovereign Debt across Three Centuries and numerous articles in political science and economics journals.
Tomz received the International Studies Association’s Karl Deutsch Award, given to a scholar who, within 10 years of earning a Ph.D., has made the most significant contribution to the study of international relations. He has also won the Giovanni Sartori Award for the best book developing or applying qualitative methods; the Jack L. Walker Award for the best article on Political Organizations and Parties; the best paper award from the APSA section on Elections, Public Opinion and Voting Behavior; the best paper award from the APSA section on Experimental Research; and the Okidata Best Research Software Award. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation.
Tomz has received numerous teaching awards, including the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Cox Medal for Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research. In 2017 he received Stanford’s highest teaching honor, the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching. He founded and continues to direct the Summer Research College program for undergraduates in political science.
Tomz holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University; a master’s degree from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar; and an undergraduate degree from Georgetown University. He has been a visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the Hoover Institution, the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, and the International Monetary Fund. -
Andrew G. Walder
Denise O'Leary & Kent Thiry Professor of the Humanities and Sciences and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMarket reforms in China; and political movements in China during the Cultural Revolution.
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Leif Wenar
Olive H. Palmer Professor of the Humanities, Professor of Philosophy, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
BioLeif Wenar is a political philosopher. After receiving his AB at Stanford, he earned his PhD at Harvard, worked in Britain, and returned to Stanford in 2020.
He is the author of Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World and the author-meets-critics volume Beyond Blood Oil: Philosophy, Policy, and the Future. He is also the author of the entries for ‘John Rawls’ and ‘Rights’ in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. His articles have appeared in Mind, Analysis, Philosophy & Public Affairs, Ethics, The Journal of Political Philosophy, The Columbia Law Review, and The Philosopher’s Annual. He co-edited Giving Well: The Ethics of Philanthropy, as well as an autobiographical volume by the economist FA Hayek.
He has been a Visiting Professor at the Stanford Center on Ethics and Society, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the William H. Bonsall Visiting Professor in the Stanford Philosophy Department, a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow and a Visiting Professor at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, a Visiting Professor at the Princeton Department of Politics, a Fellow of the Program on Justice and the World Economy at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at The Murphy Institute of Political Economy, and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University School of Philosophy.
His public writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, and the playbill for the White Light Festival at Lincoln Center. In London, he served for several years on the Mayor’s Policing Ethics Panel, which advises the Mayor and the Metropolitan Police on issues such as digital surveillance and the use of force.
He is currently developing unity theory, a foundational account of what makes for more valuable lives, relationships, and societies. His published work can be found at wenar.info. -
Yiqing Xu
Associate Professor of Political Science
BioDr. Xu’s primary research areas are causal inference and comparative politics. His recent work focuses on developing methods for more credible causal inference and on improving the reproducibility and robustness of empirical research. He received his PhD in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MA in Economics from Peking University, and a BA in Economics from Fudan University.
Dr. Xu has published widely in leading journals across the social sciences and applied statistics. He has received numerous professional awards. In 2024, he received the Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Political Methodology in recognition of his significant contributions to the field within ten years of earning his PhD.
Dr. Xu is affiliated with the Stanford Causal Science Center and the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions, as well as other research institutions. -
Amy Zegart
Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Senior Fellow at Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, at Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, & Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsU.S. intelligence, cybersecurity, political risk, grand strategy
