Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of "The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t" (Oxford University Press, 2025) and "Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: The Rise of Programmatic Politics in the United States and Britain" (Cambridge University Press, 2018).