Jonathan A. Rodden

Jonathan A. Rodden is a professor of political science at Stanford University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He has written several articles and three books on federalism and fiscal decentralization. One of those books, Hamilton’s Paradox: The Promise and Peril of Fiscal Federalism (Cambridge University Press, 2005), was the recipient of the Gregory Luebbert Prize for the best book in the field of comparative politics, and the Martha Derthick Book Award for “Lasting Contribution to the Study of Federalism.” He has worked with institutions including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, USAID, and the European Parliament on issues related to fiscal decentralization and federalism.

Rodden has also written papers on the geographic distribution of political preferences within countries, legislative bargaining, the distribution of budgetary transfers across regions, and the historical origins of political institutions. He has written a series of papers applying new statistical techniques to the study of political geography and redistricting, culminating in a 2019 book titled Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide (Basic Books, 2019). Building on this work, he has served as an expert witness in multiple court cases related to voting rights and redistricting, written amicus briefs for the U.S. Supreme Court, and drawn redistricting plans that were implemented by courts. 

Rodden’s project, “Within-Party Discord and Polarization,” explores the argument that the explanation for the rise of so-called “affective polarization” lies not in the emergence of parties that come to resemble homogeneous tribes, but rather, in the ideological and social heterogeneity within parties. When parties are fissiparous, political elites remain silent about their own platforms — any of which are unpopular even with their own supporters — and focus instead on drawing attention to the most extreme members of the out-party, leading voters to misperceive and disdain the out-party.