Luis Ricardo Fraga, Stanford University
Secretary 2006-07

Luis Ricardo Fraga is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and School of Education (by courtesy) at Stanford University.  He received his A.B., cum laude, from Harvard University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Rice University.  His primary interests are urban politics, education politics, voting rights policy, and the politics of race and ethnicity.  He is co-editor of Ethnic and Racial Minorities in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Greenwood 1992). He was a member of the APSA standing committee on Civic Engagement and Education that co-authored the recently published Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Undermine Citizen Participation, and What We Can Do About It (Brookings Institution Press 2005) .  He is also co-author of the recently published  Multiethnic Moments: The Politics of Urban Education Reform (Temple University Press 2006).  He has published extensively in scholarly journals and edited volumes including Perspectives on Politics, The Journal of Politics, Urban Affairs Quarterly, Western Political Quarterly, Dubois Review, and the Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy.  He is currently completing two additional books: The Changing Urban Regime: Toward an Informed Public Interest, a history of the political incorporation of Tejanos in San Antonio city politics from 1836-2005, and Missed Opportunities: The Politics of Schools in San Francisco, an examination of the implementation of a desegregation consent decree from 1983 to 2005.

He served as president of the Western Political Science Association in 1997-98.  He served on the Executive Council of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 1998-2000. 

In 1989-90 he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University.  In 2003-04 he was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, where he worked on a study entitled “Gender and Ethnicity: The Political Incorporation of Latina and Latino State Legislators,” based on the first-ever nationwide survey of Latina/o state legislators in the U.S.

Fraga is also one of six principal investigators on the Latino National Survey (LNS), the first-ever sixteen state-stratified survey of Latinos in the U.S.  It asks questions regarding political attitudes, behavior, and beliefs.  This project has received $1.2M in support from major foundations and universities.

He is also the principal investigator on the project “Interests and Representation: Ethnic Advocacy on California School Boards,” the first-ever statewide study of Latino school board members in California.

Fraga has received a number of teaching and advising awards at Stanford including the Rhodes Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (1993), the Dinkelspiel Award for Distinctive Contributions to Undergraduate Education (1995), the Allan V. Cox Medal for Faculty Excellence Fostering Undergraduate Research (1997), the Faculty Award from the Chicano/Latino Graduating Class (1993, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001), the Undergraduate Faculty Advisor of the Year Award (2001), and the Associated Students of Stanford University Teaching Award (2003).  He was also given the Adaljiza Sosa-Riddell Award for Exemplary Mentoring of Graduate Latina/o Students by the Committee on the Status of Latinos in the Profession of the American Political Science Association (2001) and this same award for mentoring junior faculty (2004).