Penn State · Center for Social Data Analytics · Public Square Analytics
Bruce A. Desmarais
I develop machine learning, network analysis, and generative AI methods to understand how policy spreads and how public officials communicate in the digital public square.
About
I am the DeGrandis-McCourtney Early Career Professor in Political Science at Penn State, Director of the Center for Social Data Analytics, and an affiliate of the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences. My lab develops and applies social data science methods to study systems of policymaking and digital communication with policymakers.
I am also co-founder and CEO of Public Square Analytics, whose product GovFeeds helps local governments learn from each other on social media. I hold a Ph.D. from UNC Chapel Hill and taught at UMass Amherst before joining Penn State.
Research areas
Policy diffusion and networks
How policies spread across states, cities and countries, and the statistical methods (network event history analysis, latent network inference) that recover who learns from whom.
Digital communication and public officials
How elected officials and local governments communicate online, from misinformation and harmful content to how residents engage with official posts.
Network analysis and inferential methods
Statistical models for networks, including ERGMs, TERGMs and network-effects regression, with open-source software for applied researchers.
AI and machine learning for social science
Using machine learning and generative AI as research instruments, and measuring how AI is changing government and public communication.
Recent publications
- palsr: Projected Actor Locations for spatial modeling of dyadic interactions between moving actors
- Elected officials' online anti-vaccination statements respond to online engagement
- The Digitally Accountable Public Representation Database: Online Communication by U.S. Officials
- Elected Officials' Online Sharing of Misinformation: Institutional and Ideological Checks
- Networks of Inclusion: Using Teams and Technology to Create Diverse Social Capital
- Collaborative Diffusion: The Dynamics of Policy Output in COVID-19 Interstate Compacts
The lab
My students study policy diffusion, causal inference on networks, ideology measurement, and digital politics. Alumni hold faculty positions at KAIST, George Mason, and the University of South Carolina, and research roles at Meta, Amazon, and Princeton.
Meet the labSpeaking
I speak to academic, government, and industry audiences on AI and public communication, policy diffusion, and network methods.
Talks & Workshops