Susan Stokes

In 2016, Stokes co-founded Bright Line Watch, an initiative to monitor the strength of U.S. democracy, The initiative conducts ongoing sets of surveys of political scientists and the general public in the United States to assess views of U.S. democratic performance.

Stokes founded the Chicago Center on Democracy—based at the University of Chicago—in 2018, and serves as its faculty director. The center's focus is on research, public engagement, and building tools to expand public understanding of how democracies function.

Stokes studied anthropology for her bachelor's degree at Harvard-Radcliffe and master's degree at Stanford University. She received her PhD in political science from Stanford in 1988. Since then, she has held academic appointments at the University of Washington (1988–91), the University of Chicago (1991-2005; 2018–present), and Yale University (2005–18, including serving as the John S. Saden Professor and Chair of the Political Science Department 2009-14). Stokes’ work has been supported by research grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation (1997–99, 2003–05), the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2003–04), the MacArthur Foundation (1990–94), the Fulbright Program (1981–82, 1985–86), the American Philosophical Society (1999-2000), and the Russell Sage Foundation (2014-15). She teaches courses on political development, political parties and democracy, comparative political behavior, and distributive politics.

Susan Carol Stokes (born 1959) is an American political scientist and the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in the Political Science department of the University of Chicago, and the faculty director of the Chicago Center on Democracy. Her academic focus is on Latin American politics, comparative politics, and how democracies function in developing countries. Stokes is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.