[5] 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.
In his autobiographical preface to Changing Party Coalitions: The Mystery of Red State-Blue State Alignment, Hough discussed the impact of historical events and key mentors on this thinking.
Perhaps my greatest debt at Harvard is to William Yandell Elliott, who was given the task of being my tutor in my junior and senior year and who supervised my honors thesis on American policy toward the Soviet Union from 1940 to 1946.
At that time Elliott was a close adviser to Vice President Richard Nixon and the dissertation supervisor of Henry Kissinger — and, as such, had a key unrecognized role in bringing the two together.
Never was I a more confident — or accurate — forecaster than on the problems Carter would have in his foreign policy when he gave both of my former professors a key role in his Administration.
Those younger scholars, many of whom worked on the issues of Post-Soviet nationalities, included Dominique Arel, Ronald Suny, William Reisinger, Eugene Huskey, Cynthia Kaplan, Gerry Easter, Evelyn Davidheiser, and Susan Goodrich Lehmann.
Hough co-founded the Russian Survey Network (RSN) in 1993 along with Sergei Tumanov (Director of the Center for Sociological Studies at Moscow State University), Mikhail Nikolaevich Guboglo (deputy director of the Institute for Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences),[7] Tatiana Guboglo, and Susan Goodrich Lehmann.
Hough argued that "narrow cultural issues are used as electoral platforms in today’s politics not because of their inherent importance, but because of party strategies.
This groundbreaking book examined England and Spain's history from 1000 to 1800 and the legacy of these countries in the United States and Mexico to explain why development takes centuries.
Synthesizing the classic works of Douglass North, Mancur Olson and Max Weber, Hough and Grier emphasize the need for an effective state.
[9] An avid blogger and editorial writer, Hough was the focus of a controversy in 2015 around his online comment to The New York Times article "How Racism Doomed Baltimore", in which he compared Asians and Blacks.