"[2] He then received a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University in 1971 after completing a 492-page long doctoral dissertation titled "The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910" under the supervision of C. Vann Woodward.
[3] Kousser joined the California Institute of Technology in 1971, where he is professor of history and social sciences.
One of Kousser's primary fields of expertise is the current and historical interaction of race and voting rights in the United States.
He has served as an expert witness in over thirty-five federal or state voting rights cases, including Garza v. County of Los Angeles (1990), United States v. Memphis (1991), Shaw v. Hunt (1994), Cano v. Davis (2002) and Perry v. Perez (2012).
He is the author of The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (1974), and Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction (1999).