Congress

Morris P. Fiorina

Morris Fiorina is the Wendt Family Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution. Fiorina has studied American politics, with special emphasis on elections, public opinion and representation, for more than fifty years. His books include Congress—Keystone of the Washington Establishment, 1977), Retrospective Voting in American National Elections, 1981) and Divided Government, 1992).  His groundbreaking book on polarization, Culture War: The Myth of a Polarized America (with Samuel Abrams and Jeremy Pope, 2004) went through three editions, was noted in hundreds of national media outlets, and adopted in classes at more than 700 different colleges and universities.  Successor books included Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics (with Samuel Abrams, 2009) and Unstable Majorities: Polarization, Party Sorting and Political Stalemate, 2017. Hoover Press will publish his current work as Unstable Majorities Continue: The Trump Elections, in 2026.  Fiorina has served on the editorial boards of more than a dozen journals in political science, law, political economy, and public policy, and served as chairman of the Board of the American National Election Studies.  He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. He has received two career achievement awards from organized sections of the American Political Science Association. Fiorina received his BA degree from Allegheny College and his MA and PhD from the University of Rochester and taught at Caltech and Harvard coming to Stanford in 1998. He lives in Portola Valley, California with his wife who has humored him for more than half a century.