Joshua A. Tucker is a Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Professor, Professor of Politics, an affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, and an affiliated Professor of Data Science at New York University. He is the Director of NYU’s Jordan Center for Advanced Study of Russia. He is one of the co-founders and co-Directors of the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP).
Professor Tucker’s original research was in comparative politics with an emphasis on mass political behavior in East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, including elections and voting, the development of partisan attachment, public opinion formation, and mass protest, as well as the use of social media in facilitating all forms of political participation. He is the author of Regional Economic Voting: Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, 1990-99 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and co-author of the Communism’s Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes (Princeton University Press, 2017).
For the past dozen year, through his work at the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics, which he co-founded, Professor Tucker has been at the forefront of efforts to explore the intersection of social and digital media and politics, as well as developing methods for utilizing digital trace data to study politics. His research has included studies of partisan echo chambers and polarization, the effects of exposure to social media on political knowledge, online networks and protest, the online information environment around news veracity, how authoritarian regimes respond to online opposition, foreign influence campaigns, Russian bots and trolls, and a more recent line of research around Generative AI, political science research, and politics. He is the co-editor the edited volume Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, and the co-chair of the external academic research team on the U.S. 2020 Facebook & Instagram Election Study.
His research has been published in top general scientific journals, including Science, Nature, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and political science journals, including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and The Journal of Politics. His research has been supported by funding from a wide range of philanthropic foundations, as well as the National Science Foundation. In 2006, he was awarded the Emerging Scholar Award for the top scholar in the field of Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior within 10 years of the doctorate. In 2024, he was included in Clarivate’s 1% Top Cited List for the top cited researchers globally by field.
An internationally recognized scholar, Professor Tucker has served as a keynote speaker for conferences in Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Brazil, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United States, and has given over 250 invited research presentations at top domestic and international universities and research centers. He has also served as a Visiting Professor at the Juan March Institute in Madrid, Spain and Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome, Italy.
Professor Tucker serves on the Editorial Board of multiple academic journals and academic research centers, as well the Advisory Board of the American National Election Study and the Planning Commission of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. and was a founding co-editor of the Journal of Experimental Political Science.
For over a decade, Professor Tucker served as a co-author and co-editor of The Monkey Cage, a political science and policy blog published at The Washington Post. The Monkey Cage was awarded the 2010 Blog of the Year award by The Week Magazine, becoming the first academic blog to receive this honor. In addition, Time Magazine named The Monkey Cage a Top 25 Blog of 2012, and the blog also received the Online Achievement in International Studies “Best Group Blog” award in 2015 and 2016. His opinions have also been published in numerous media outlets, including the International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Daily News and The Hill, and he has appeared on broadcast outlets such as CNN International, CNBC’s Squawk Box, NY1, BBC Radio, Deutsche Welle, and TV Globo. He is currently a contributor to the Brookings Institute’s “Economics of AI” series.
Contact
Email: joshua.tucker[at]nyu.edu
Lab: csmapnyu.org