Jerry F. Hough

Jerry Fincher Hough was an American political scientist. Hough was the James B. Duke Professor of Political Science at Duke University and his research focused on domestic American politics, the Soviet Union, the democratization of Russia, and American efforts at nation-building. Hough is a part of the "revisionist school" on Soviet history, maintaining that the level of terror was much exaggerated and that the Soviet Union was institutionally weak under Joseph Stalin, among other things. He saw the focus of his research and teaching as "the relationship of long term economic development and political institutions". In his final decade he focused on "the American experience in order to better understand the way that states, markets, and democracies develop and the way in which effective and stable ones can be created and maintained."