About

Morris P. Fiorina is the Wendt Family Professor of Political Science and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He received his undergraduate degree from Allegheny College and earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Rochester in 1972, after completing his M.A. in the same field in 1971. Fiorina has taught at Caltech and Harvard before joining Stanford in 1998. His research focuses on American politics, with particular emphasis on the study of representation, public opinion, and elections. He has authored or edited thirteen books and numerous articles on these topics, contributing significantly to the understanding of American political processes. Fiorina has served on the editorial boards of multiple journals across Political Science, Political Economy, Law, and Public Policy, and held leadership roles such as Chairman of the Board of Overseers of the American National Election Studies. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. Throughout his career, Fiorina has received several awards, including Career Achievement Awards from the American Political Science Association’s Organized Sections on Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior, and Political Organizations and Parties.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Chemistry
• Epistemology
• Public administration
• History
• Philosophy
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Robert Camuto: <i>South of Somewhere: Wine, Food, and the Soul of Italy</i> University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, USA, 2021, 280 pp., ISBN: 978-1496225962, $10.68.

  Journal of Wine Economics · 2023-08-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The New York Times and The Washington Post, among others, as well as accolades from wine world luminaries such as Eric Asimov, Jancis Robinson, and Kermit Lynch.But it is easier to describe what South of Somewhere is not than what it is.While the book provides very general descriptions of various southern Italian wines, it does not approach the level of detail that one finds even in, say, Anderson's (1980) Vino, let alone Wasserman and Wasserman's (1991) weighty tome or D'Agata's (2014) magisterial work.In fact, the tasting descriptions are as much about how well the wine matches the author's personal preferences-for lighter, less alcoholic, fresher wines-as they are about more objective descriptions of what is in the glass.Similarly, although the book provides brief descriptions of local meals that sound delicious, it does not provide as much detail as one finds even in Root's (1977) treatise, The Food of Italy, let alone an actual cookbook.Of course, on the positive side of the ledger, the reader is spared the time commitment entailed in reading works like the aforementioned ones.So, what is South of Somewhere about, then?It is a collection of interesting anecdotes-personal recollections of numerous visits with southern Italian winemakers, mostly, I infer, over the past 20 years or so.Camuto begins and ends the book with visits to his ancestral village of Vico Equense on the Mediterranean coast south of Naples-memories of a 10-year-old in 1968 in the first case and an actual visit 50 years later.Although Camuto lives in Verona, his heart is in the south, which he considers "truer to the heart of the Italy I remember from my childhood" (p.8).The chapters of the book chronicle his visits.Each region of "southern" Italyfrom Umbria to Sicily and most of what is in between (except Molise)-gets a chapter.The discussion centers around producers-several from each region.The profiles focus on the producers as individuals-their backgrounds, philosophies,

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Group Concentration and the Delegation of Legislative Authority

  University of California Press eBooks · 2023 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Public administration
  PublisherDOI

• The Future of the Republican Party: 2022, 2024, and Beyond

  2022-01-01

  other
  PublisherDOI

• How to Cure the Ills of Contemporary American Democracy? A Review Essay

  Political Science Quarterly · 2021 · 12 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Law
  PublisherDOI

• Flagellating the Federal Bureaucracy

  2021-02-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Political leadership in the United States usually reduces to the ability to discern which way the tide is flowing and avoid inundation by it. The Republican party of 1980 found itself well situated to catch the wave, reflects Republican acumen—even persuasion—or merely forty-odd years of political habit. The concept of bureaucratic failure presumes a particular viewpoint on the part of the analyst—a public-interest, or general-interest, viewpoint. The less extreme variant might be termed the Insufficiently Dedicated Bureaucrat. According to this variant, bureaucrats lead harder lives than most. Material rewards are poor, public opprobrium is common, and even private satisfaction in a job well done is problematic because the nature of the enterprise makes one’s individual contribution hard to trace. Scholars as disparate as economists and sociologists are in general agreement on the root cause of bureaucratic failures: individual bureaucrats face incentives which are unrelated to, if incompatible with, the efficient and faithful implementation and administration of the law.

  PublisherDOI

• Why issue-based strategies won’t help Trump win re-election

  London School of Economics and Political Science Research Online (London School of Economics and Political Science) · 2020-10-31

  articleOpen access

  The US presidential election on 3 November will be watched closely in Europe. Drawing on recent survey evidence, Davide Angelucci, Lorenzo De Sio, Morris P. Fiorina and Mark N. Franklin illuminate the challenge facing Donald Trump in his bid for re-election. There are currently no divisive issues on which Trump stands to win more support from independents and Democrats than he stands to lose from his own support-base, while on issues for which goals are widely shared, Trump lacks credibility compared to Joe Biden.

  OA PDF

• 6. LOOKING FOR DISAGREEMENT IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Epistemology
  • Psychology
  PublisherDOI

• Divided Government in the States

  2019-07-11 · 6 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Divided government has been defined and discussed primarily in national terms: The Republicans consistently win the presidency while the Democrats win Congress or at least the House of Representatives. Election postmortems in the 1980s regularly emphasized the shallowness of Republican victories. Not only did the Republicans fail to crack the House of Representatives but, in state elections, the Democrats typically captured more than 60 percent of the governorships and legislative seats. The Michigan and Nevada cases apparently reflect intensely competitive state party systems. Republican prospects in state legislative races clearly rise and fall with national election outcomes. A complete analysis should bear out the state-level variation that reflects national forces. The contemporary California legislature epitomizes the professional pole of the amateur-professional dimension. The Massachusetts legislature was under Democratic control between 1958 and 1990, but from 1964 to 1974, the Republicans controlled the governorship.

  PublisherDOI

• Wood, B. Dan, with Soren Jordan. Party Polarization in America: The War Over Two Social Contracts

  Congress & the Presidency · 2018-09-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Party Polarization in America is an ambitious work. In the authors’ words, “this book develops a general explanation for party polarization in America from both historical and contemporary perspect...

  PublisherDOI

• Identities for Realists

  Critical Review · 2018-04-03 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels argue, in Democracy for Realists, that voters tend to be not only politically ignorant but irrationally attached to group identities. That they use group identities is not in dispute, but the irrationality of doing so is questionable. The instability and malleability of group identities suggests that they are more than primal, illogical attachments. While Achen and Bartels assume that they must be affective, they may in fact be rational. They may, for example, serve as heuristics for individual interests.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• John Ferejohn

  63 shared

• John Turner

  26 shared

• Robert E. Goodin

  Australian National University

  26 shared

• Baratz Debnam

  University of Westminster

  25 shared

• Gerald A. Strom

  Case Western Reserve University

  25 shared

• Lawrence S. Mayer

  Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center

  25 shared

• Kenneth M. Roberts

  Cornell University

  25 shared

• Gordon Tullock

  George Mason University

  25 shared

Education

• B.A.

  Allegheny College

• Ph.D.

  University of Rochester

Awards & honors

• Career Achievement Awards from the American Political Scienc…