Noise, Bias, and Expertise in Political Communication Networks

Robert Huckfeldt is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Davis where he currently serves as Director of the Institute for Government Affairs and the UC Center Sacramento. 

 

His primary research interests lie in participation, communication, and decision-making.  The unifying focus of his work is on individuals who are imbedded within social contexts and connected to one another through networks of communication.  He has carried out studies of urban neighborhoods, national election studies, comparative studies of urban areas, and cross-national election studies, as well as experimental studies and dynamic simulations of political processes.  He is currently engaged in a study of political expertise within communication networks and the potential for individual level expertise to enhance the decision-making capacity of aggregate populations.  This project involves survey analysis, group based experiments, and agent based models.  He is the author or coauthor of Politics in Context; Race and the Decline of Class in American Politics;  Citizens, Politics, and Social Communication; Political Disagreement; and a series of research articles.

 

He is the past president of the Midwest Political Science Association; past president of the Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior Section of the American Political Science Association; and the past chair of the Political Networks Section of the American Political Science Association.  He received his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis.