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| Name |
Aldrich, John H. |
| Location
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Duke University |
| Primary Field
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Social and Political Sciences |
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 Research Interests
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Prof. Aldrich has worked on elections, political parties and legislatures, that is, the institutions of democracy, mostly (but not exclusively) studying the U.S. Early in his career, he was particularly productive in developing methodologies to study democratic politics, especially mathematical models and statistical methods. But these were always developed to answer substantive questions about who runs for office, who wins, and what they do and how they are constrained once in office. He was an early student of the current presidential nomination process, developing dynamic models to explain how they worked and why one candidate emerges to win before the national nominating conventions. He has assessed how the American two-party system has developed, how it has shaped both electoral and intra-governmental policy making, and thus furthered (or sometimes hindered) democratic politics. Especially with his long-time co-author, David Rohde, he has developed and tested a theory of partisan politics called “conditional party government,” and assessed how it has developed the partisan polarized electoral and legislative world we live in today. Most recently, he has turned (or returned) his attention to the question of how electoral politics has changed over the post WW II years, transforming the role of citizens in US electoral democracy. |
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