Scott de Marchi is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Decision Science program at Duke University. His work is currently funded by the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and USAID. He has been an external fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and the National Defense University and is currently a principal investigator for NSF’s EITM program.
His research focuses on mathematical models, especially bargaining theory, computational social science, machine learning, and mixed methods. Substantively, he examines decision-making in contexts that include the American Congress, coalition formation in proportional representation systems, crisis bargaining and interstate conflict, and voting behavior in the United States. In all of his work, the approach has been in the EITM tradition of building a theoretical model of the problem and then generating dispositive tests of this model.
Currently, he is a Principal Investigator of the USAID funded program Inspires which is building an early warning system to detect closing civic spaces and authoritarian influence around the world.
USAID and partner organizations will use the results of this forecasting model to better understand the dynamics of the expansion or closure of civic spaces as well as the best approaches for navigating these shifts with policy / program interventions.