Bruce Desmarais received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in summer 2010. In fall 2010, he started as an assistant professor in the Deptartment of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He joined UMass as one of the core faculty members of the Computational Social Science Initiative, a collaborative organization of scholars in sociology, political science, statistics and computer science.

Bruce's primary areas of research include political methodology, computational social science and American politics. In his work, Bruce focuses on precisely identifying the complex ways in which political actors and institutions are interdependent, and developing quantitative methods capable of illuminating these dependencies. In his dissertation he developed methods for the identification and modeling of complex interdependence in collective decisionmaking processes, with extensive applications to the analysis of voting on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Bruce's more recent work focuses on the development and application of methods for the analysis of political networks. Substantive applications of network analysis include international conflict, defense alliances, terrorist events, and legislative collaboration. He also has a research agenda in the use of out-of-sample predictive diagnostics for models of political processes. Very recently, Bruce has been working on the analysis of government information management and communication networks.

Contact

Publications

1. Peter Krafft, Juston Moore, Hanna Wallach, and Bruce Desmarais. Topic-Partitioned Multinet work Embeddings. Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Forthcoming 2012.

2. Skyler J. Cranmer, Tobias Heinrich, and Bruce A. Desmarais. Reciprocity and the Structural Determinants of the International Sanctions Network. Social Networks, Forthcoming in the Special Issue on Political Networks

3. Bruce A. Desmarais and Skyler J. Cranmer. Micro-level interpretation of exponential random graph models with application to estuary networks. Policy Studies Journal, Forthcoming.

4. Skyler J. Cranmer, Bruce A. Desmarais, and Justin H. Kirkland. Toward a Network Theory of Alliance Formation. International Interactions, Forthcoming

5. Stuart M. Benjamin and Bruce A. Desmarais. Standing the Test of Time; The Breadth of Majority Coalitions and the Fate of U.S. Supreme Court Precedents. Journal of Legal Analysis, Forthcoming in the Special Issue on Judicial Collegiality.

6. Skyler J. Cranmer, Bruce A. Desmarais, and Elizabeth Menninga. Complex Dependencies in the Alliance Network. Conflict Management and Peace Science, Forthcoming.

7. Bruce A. Desmarais and Jeffrey J. Harden. Comparing partial likelihood and robust estimation methods for the cox regression model. Political Analysis, 20(1):113–135, 2012.

8. Bruce A. Desmarais and Skyler J. Cranmer. Statistical inference for valued-edge networks: The generalized exponential random graph model. PLoS ONE, 7(1):e30136, 01 2012.

9. Bruce A. Desmarais. Lessons in disguise: Multivariate predictive mistakes in collective choice models. Public Choice, 151(3):719–737, 2012.

10. Bruce A. Desmarais and Skyler J. Cranmer. Statistical Mechanics of Networks: Estimation and Uncertainty. Physica A, 391(4):1865–1876, 2012.

11. Skyler J. Cranmer and Bruce A. Desmarais. Inferential Network Analysis with Exponential Random Graph Models. Political Analysis, 19(1):66–86, 2011.

12. Jeffrey J. Harden and Bruce A. Desmarais. Linear Models with Outliers: Choosing Between Conditional- Mean and Conditional-Median Methods. State Politics & Policy Quarterly, 11(4):371–389, 2011

13. Allison T. Freeman and Bruce A. Desmarais. Portfolio Adjustment to Home Equity Accumulation among CRA Borrowers. Journal of Housing Research, 20(2):141–160, 2011

14. Bruce A. Desmarais and Skyler J. Cranmer. Forecasting the Locational Dynamics of Transnational Terrorism: A Network Analytic Approach. In Proceedings of the European Intelligence and Security Informatics Conference (EISIC) 2011. IEEE Computer Society, 2011.

15. Bruce A. Desmarais and Skyler J. Cranmer. Consistent Confidence Intervals for Maximum Pseudolikelihood Estimators. Neural Information Processing Systems 2010 Workshop on Computational Social Science and the Wisdom of Crowds, 2010.

Presentations

1. “Topic-Specific Latent Space Modeling of Government Communication Networks.” Workshop on Information in Networks, New York University, 2012.

2. “Strategic Interdependence on the U.S. Supreme Court: The Analysis of Voting on the Merits.” Political Networks Conference, University of Colorado at Boulder, 2012.

3. “The Senate Press Events Network: Another Look at Legislative Collaboration.” Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, (2012).

4. “Forecasting the Locational Dynamics of Transnational Terrorism’.’ Computational Social Science Initiative, University of Massachusetts Amherst (2012).

5. “Standing the Test of Time; The Breadth of Majority Coalitions and the Fate of U.S. Supreme Court Precedents.” Conference on Judicial Collegiality, University of Southern California (2011).

6. “The Generalized Exponential Random Graph Model’.’ Political Networks Conference, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, (2011).

7. “Consistent Confidence Intervals for Maximum Pseudolikelihood Estimators.” Neural Information Processing Systems Workshop on Computational Social Science and the Wisdom of Crowds, Whistler, BC, (2010).

8. “The Exponential Random Configuration Model for the Empirical Analysis of Interdependent Political Choices.” American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, (2010)

9. “The Temporal Exponential Random Graph Model”, Political Networks Conference, Duke University, (2010)

10. “The Exponential Random Configuration Model for the Empirical Analysis of Interdependent Political Choices.” Annual Meeting for the Society of Political Methodology, University of Iowa, (2010).

Teaching

Official Secrecy in the United States. [syl]

Political Network Analysis. [syl]

Network Analysis Workshop (Applications in R). [materials]

ICPSR Network Analysis. [materials]

NetInf Workshop for Political Networks and Causality. [materials]

Introduction to Quantitative Analysis. [syl]

Deptartment of Political Science | Computational Social Science Initiative | UMass Amherst