People

Didi Kuo is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University. She studies comparative politics with a focus on democratization, development, and corruption and clientelism. She is currently completing her dissertation, "Patron States: The Decline of Clientelism in the United States and Britain, 1870-1920," which compares clientelistic outcomes in electoral and legislative politics over a half-century. Through analysis of civil service reforms and railway regulation, she shows that businesses were critical to programmatic reforms and political party centralization in both the United States and Britain. Different patterns of business-party relations then affected state-building outcomes, with clientelism emerging in regulatory agencies. Her research has been funded by the Center for American Political Studies, the Center for European Studies, and the American Political Science Association. She has also served as a Teaching Fellow for Introduction to Comparative Politics, the Political Economy of Development, and the Sophomore Tutorial in Government: Democracy, and has received the Certificate of Distinction in Teaching for each course. From 2011-12, she was the Departmental Writing Fellow in Government. Didi Kuo received a BA in political science from Emory University. As a Marshall Scholar, she received an MA in Politics from the University of Essex, and an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University.