The Structural Democratic Reforms Project

Team

Katherine Clayton

Political Science, Stanford University

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, with joint appointments in the Mind & Body Lab and the Polarization and Social Change Lab. I received my PhD in Political Science from Stanford in 2024 and my BA from Dartmouth College in 2018, where I was valedictorian of my graduating class. Click here for a copy of my CV.

My career has followed a somewhat unconventional path. While my doctorate is in political science, I learned over the course of my training that the methodologies and theories used to examine interesting questions in the social sciences are applicable across fields. I also learned that the best research is a product of both skill and passion, and I have charted a path that allows me to study the topics that I care most about. In my current work, I therefore use surveys and experiments to study attitudes, beliefs, and behavior in two key areas: athlete/health psychology and political psychology. I also develop interventions focused on changing key outcomes in these two domains.

My research has been published or is forthcoming at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS Nexus, Science, the American Journal of Political Science, and Political Science Research and Methods, among others, and has received coverage in a variety of major media outlets. My book, Campus Diversity: The Hidden Consensus, was published at Cambridge University Press in 2020.

Robb Willer

Sociology, Stanford University

Robb Willer is a Professor of Sociology, Psychology, and Business at Stanford University where he is Director of the Politics and Social Change Lab and Co-Director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.

Professor Willer’s teaching and research focus on the bases of social order. One line of his research investigates the factors driving the emergence of collective action, norms, solidarity, generosity, and status hierarchies. In other research, he explores the social psychology of political attitudes, including the effects of fear, prejudice, and masculinity in contemporary U.S. politics. Most recently, his work has focused on morality, studying how people reason about what is right and wrong and the social consequences of their judgments.

His research involves various empirical and theoretical methods, including laboratory and field experiments, surveys, direct observation, archival research, physiological measurement, agent-based modeling, and social network analysis.

Brendan Nyhan

Political Science, Dartmouth College

Brendan Nyhan is the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. His research, which focuses on misperceptions about politics and health care, has been published in journals including Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Nature Human Behaviour, Pediatrics, and Vaccine. Nyhan was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023 and previously was named a Guggenheim Fellow by the Guggenheim Foundation, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and a Belfer Fellow by the Anti-Defamation League. He also received the Emerging Scholar Award for the top scholar in the field within 10 years of his Ph.D. by the American Political Science Association's section on Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior.

Nyhan received his Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Duke University and previously served as a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research and Professor of Public Policy at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

He is a co-director of Bright Line Watch, a watchdog group that monitors the status of American democracy. Nyhan was previously a contributor to The Upshot at The New York Times and GEN/Medium and a media critic for Columbia Journalism Review. You can follow his public commentary on politics and the media in his Threads feed or on his blog, where he posts updates on new public-facing interviews and articles.

Previously, Nyhan was a founder and editor of Spinsanity, a non-partisan watchdog of political spin that was syndicated in Salon and the Philadelphia Inquirer, along with Ben Fritz and Bryan Keefer. Together they co-authored All the President's Spin, a New York Times bestseller that Amazon named one of the best political books of 2004. Before graduate school, he worked as a marketing and fundraising consultant for Benetech, a Silicon Valley technology nonprofit, and as Deputy Communications Director of the Bernstein for US Senate campaign in Nevada.

Molly Offer-Westort

Political Science, University of Chicago

Molly Offer-Westort is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, with affiliations in Statistics and Data Science. Her research develops statistical methodology for the social sciences, integrating machine learning with experimental design to study causal quantities. Substantively, she investigates online behavior, using social media experiments with adaptive assignment, policy learning, and natural language processing to examine how conversations and information shape political attitudes and behavior.

Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Vaccine Confidence Fund; she was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2024. Her PhD is from Yale, joint in Political Science and Statistics & Data Science. Before academia, she worked on policy research in West Africa with the World Bank and the United Nations.

Ben Kinder

Public Policy, Data Science & Social Systems, Stanford University

Ben Kinder is an undergraduate at Stanford University majoring in Public Policy with a secondary major in Data Science & Social Systems and a minor in Jewish Studies. He is currently an honors student for Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, where he is writing his senior thesis on how election systems impact representation in office. He is also a research assistant in the Politics and Social Change lab.