Donald E. Stokes

Donald E. Stokes (1 April 1927 – 26 January 1997) was an American political scientist and dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Stokes was a founder of public opinion research, and a coauthor of the seminal book The American Voter.

Early life and education Stokes was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on April 1, 1927. He obtained a bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1951, and a PhD from Yale University in 1958. Through thousands of interviews with American citizens during the election periods in 1948, 1952, 1954, 1956 and 1958, the authors first identified several of the core results in voting behavior that would form the Michigan model. These include the importance of party identification, the low information level of many voters, and the large number of voters who remain undecided until immediately before an election.

Stokes is one of the most cited political scientists of all time, and is widely regarded as a founding scholar in the empirical study of political behavior. Harold Tafler Shapiro, who was president of the University of Michigan and then of Princeton University, called Stokes "a pioneer in the development of modern political science".