David Brady is deputy director and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also the Bowen H. and Janice Arthur McCoy Professor of Political Science and Ethics in the Stanford Graduate School of Business and professor of political science in the School of Humanities and Sciences at the university.

Brady is an expert on the U.S. Congress and congressional decision making. His current research focuses on the political history of the U.S. Congress, the history of U.S. election results, and public policy processes in general.

His recent publications include, with John Cogan, "Out of Step, Out of Office," American Political Science Review, March 2001; with John Cogan and Morris Fiorina, Change and Continuity in House Elections (Stanford University Press, 2000); Revolving Gridlock: Politics and Policy from Carter to Clinton (Westview Press, 1999); with John Cogan and Doug Rivers, How the Republicans Captured the House: An Assessment of the 1994 Midterm Elections (Hoover Essays in Public Policy, 1995); and The 1996 House Elections: Reaffirming the Conservative Trend (Hoover Essays in Public Policy, 1997). Brady is also author of Congressional Voting in a Partisan Era (University of Kansas Press, 1973) and Critical Elections in the U.S. House of Representatives (Stanford University Press, 1988).

Brady has been on continuing appointment at Stanford University since 1987. He was associate dean from 1997 to 2001 at Stanford University; a fellow at the center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 1985 to 1986 and again in 2001-2; the Autrey Professor at Rice University, 1980-87; and an associate professor and professor at the University of Houston, 1972-79.

In 1995 and 2000 he received the Congressional Quarterly Prize for the "best paper on a legislative topic." In 1992 he received the Dinkelspiel Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from Stanford University, and in 1993 he received the Phi Beta Kappa Award for best teacher at Stanford University.

Brady taught previously at Rice University, where he was honored with the George Brown Award for Superior Teaching. He also received the Richard F. Fenno Award of the American Political Science Association for the "best book on legislative studies" published in 1988-89.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Brady received a B.S. degree from Western Illinois University and an M.A. in 1967 and a Ph.D. in 1970 from the University of Iowa. He was a C.I.C. scholar at the University of Michigan from 1964 to 1965.

Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad.  A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).

During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.

Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.