John H. Aldrich

Biosketch

John H. Aldrich is the Pfizer, Inc./Edmund T. Pratt, Jr. University Distinguished Professor of Political Science, emeritus, Duke University. He earned his B.A. from Allegheny College, Meadville, PA, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. He was Assistant and then Associate Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University and served as Associate Professor and Professor at the University of Minnesota. He has been a Professor at Duke University since then. He was co-editor (with John Sullivan) of the American Journal of Political Science and was President of the Southern Political Science Association, the Midwest Political Science Association, and the American Political Science Association. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has held a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at Bellagio, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. He spent a decade working with the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and has served over two decades on the American National Election Studies Advisory Board. He was also able to work with the Carter Center’s China program. He has won a number of research and career awards and received an honorary doctorate from Allegheny College.

Research Interests

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.