University of Massachusetts Amherst

Search Google Appliance

Links

Desmarais receives APSA Best Paper Award

The Political Networks Section of the American Political Science Association recently recognized Bruce Desmarais with a "2013 Best Conference Paper in Political Networks" prize for his article "Inferring Policy Diffusion Networks in the American States" (co-authored with Jeffrey J. Harden and Frederick J. Boehmke).

The article explores how policy innovations spread across the states, documenting the existence of a policy diffusion network. "We summarize and analyze the structure of the inferred diffusion network and assess the ways in which it has changed over the last several decades," the authors say. "We [also] demonstrate how the inferred diffusion network can be integrated into conventional statistical models of state policy adoption." This combination of empirical grounding and cutting edge methods is what most impressed the award committee. 

Desmarais, who is on leave this semester to serve as a fellow at the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI), is a key faculty member of the Computational Social Science Initiative at UMass.

News Type: 

  • Faculty News