Xandra Kayden

Xandra Kayden is a political scientist and a senior fellow at the School of Public Affairs at UCLA. She president of the League of Women Voters of Los Angeles, and has served as a member of the organization’s state and national boards.

She did undergraduate and graduate work at Columbia University in American history, holds a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard, and did post-doctoral work at Stanford on organizational behavior. She has participated in and studied American political institutions for many years at all levels of government, and was the founding director of the Women's Action Program in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare -- the first government program to respond to the women's movement of the 1960s and '70s.

Her books include Campaign Organization, The Party Goes On, and Surviving Power. She has contributed to journals and magazines and written chapters in a number of other books on women’s issues and politics as a member of the Campaign Finance Study Group at Harvard. She was a regular contributor to The Los Angeles Times on urban issues for over a decade and does consulting on campaign finance, ethics, urban and ethnic issues.