Laura Stoker is Professor of the Graduate School in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the development and change of political attitudes and behavior with a focus on family influences and generational change. She also writes on topics at the intersection of research design and statistics, including the optimal design of multi-level studies, problems of aggregation, and the estimation of cohort effects. She has regularly taught undergraduate and graduate courses on political psychology and research methods. Her publications have appeared in many venues including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies, and Journal of Politics. Stoker is the recipient of fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), Oxford University, and the University of Manchester. Stoker has served on the Board of the American National Election Studies (2000-2002, 2018-present; Chair 2000-2002), the British National Election Studies (2014-2016), and the CASBS Causal Inference for Social Impact Lab (2019-present).
My current research examines the rise of institutional and corporate rights of conscience in health care. This project weaves together the court decisions, legislation, medical and bioethical arguments, religious ideas, and lived experiences that shaped the disparate trajectories of reproductive healthcare, LGBT healthcare, and of end-of-life care from the 1970s to the present. In untangling how and why uneven patterns of rights for women, sexual minorities, people of color, immigrants, and people with disabilities emerged, I explore how religion has influenced health care as well as how law, politics, and culture have framed religious arguments about medicine. Although conventional accounts often frame conscience conflicts as religious versus secular, I focus on the inter- and intra-religious debates that occur within institutions, policy, and public discourse.