Bio
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 directs NYU’s Jordan Center for Advanced Study of Russia and co-founded and co-directs the NYU Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics (CSMAP).
His original research focused on comparative politics across East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, examining elections, voting behavior, partisan attachment, public opinion, and mass protest. He authored Regional Economic Voting: Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, 1990-99 (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and co-authored Communism’s Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes (Princeton University Press, 2017).
Over the past dozen years, through CSMAP, Tucker has pioneered research on social and digital media’s intersection with politics, as well as associated methodological developments. His investigations encompass echo chambers, polarization, social media exposure effects, protest networks, information environments, authoritarian responses to online opposition, foreign influence campaigns, and a more recent line of research around AI, political science research, and politics. He co-edited Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, co-led the academic research team for the U.S. 2020 Facebook & Instagram Election Study, and is the co-chair of the 2025-2026 American Political Science Association Presidential Task Force on AI, Politics, and Political Science.
His research has appeared in top general scientific journals including Science, Nature, 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 work has been supported by funding from a wide range of philanthropic foundations, as well as the National Science Foundation, and has received numerous best paper and best article awards. In 2006, he received 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 and 2025, he was named to Clarivate’s 1% Top Cited Researchers list 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 held visiting professorships at the Juan March Institute in Madrid and Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome.
He has served on editorial and advisory boards for a wide range of academic journals and research projects, including twelve years on the Board of the American National Election Study and is currently in his second 6-year term on the planning committe of the Comparative Study of Electoral Surveys. He was also a founding co-editor of the Journal of Experimental Political Science.
For over a decade, Tucker co-authored and co-edited The Monkey Cage at The Washington Post, earning the 2010 Blog of the Year award from The Week Magazine—the first academic blog to receive this honor. Time Magazine named it a Top 25 Blog of 2012, and it won Online Achievement in International Studies “Best Group Blog” awards 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, 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.