About

Daniel DellaPosta is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Social Data Analytics at The Pennsylvania State University. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from Cornell University in 2017 and holds a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Chicago, obtained in 2011. As a sociologist, he applies tools such as network science, agent-based computational modeling, natural language processing, and a wide range of statistical methodologies to study core questions arising in political, economic, cultural, and organizational contexts. His research broadly aims to understand how interdependent actors collectively shape social structure, addressing puzzles that pique his curiosity. For example, he investigates why it is easy to predict someone's political ideology based on their music or beverage preferences, how the American Mafia was able to form a nationwide criminal conspiracy despite geographic isolation and disconnection among groups, and how proximity to outgroups can simultaneously foster both tolerance and enmity. His work has been published in leading journals including the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Social Networks, and Organization Science. He has received awards from various sections of the American Sociological Association and the Academy of Management's division on Organization and Management Theory. Outside of his academic pursuits, he enjoys writing amateur movie blurbs, studying Japanese, and reading John Le Carre novels.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Criminology
• Computer Security
• Artificial Intelligence
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Political economy
• Public relations
• Chemistry
• Geography
• Data science
• Cognitive psychology
• Economics
• Positive economics

Selected publications

• Why moderate voters choose extreme candidates: voter uncertainty as a driver of elite polarization

  Social Forces · 2025-11-10

  article

  Abstract Representative democracy depends on elected officials reflecting voters’ policy preferences. Yet, US elected officials are more ideologically extreme than even the voters from their own party. This disparity is especially puzzling in light of recent studies reinforcing the view that voters are highly motivated by policy preferences and ideological fit when selecting among candidates. Using both agent-based computational models and an online vignette experiment, we uncover a novel mechanism through which candidates who rigidly back the party’s ideological priorities, even when doing so is unpopular among the party’s own voters, may paradoxically benefit because partisan voters under conditions of uncertainty infer that such candidates are also likelier than more moderate and representative candidates to support the party’s other (more popular) positions. This dynamic alone can produce a world with moderately partisan voters but extreme politicians, not despite but precisely because of those voters’ motivation to see their (relatively moderate) policy preferences reflected by their elected representatives.

  PublisherDOI

• Partisan styles of self-presentation in U.S. Twitter bios

  Scientific Reports · 2024-01-11 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Political polarization in the United States goes beyond divided opinions on key political issues, extending to realms of culture, lifestyle, and social identity once thought to be apolitical. Using a sample of 1 million Twitter bios, this study investigates how users' partisan self-presentation on social media tends to include cultural as well as political markers. Representing the text in Twitter bios as semantic networks, the study reveals clear partisan differences in how users describe themselves, even on topics that seem apolitical. Consequently, active Twitter users' political alignments can be statistically inferred from the non-political references in their bios, even in the absence of explicitly partisan language. These findings offer further evidence of partisan polarization that is aligned with lifestyle preferences. Further research is needed to determine if users are aware of that alignment, which might indicate the politicization of lifestyle preferences. The findings also suggest an under-recognized way social media can promote polarization, not through political discourse or argument, but simply in how users present cultural and lifestyle preferences on those platforms.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Is your neighbor your friend? Scan methods for spatial social network hotspot detection

  Transactions in GIS · 2023-04-20 · 1 citations

  article

  Abstract GIS analyses use moving window methods and hotspot detection to identify point patterns within a given area. Such methods can detect clusters of point events such as crime or disease incidences. Yet, these methods do not account for connections between entities, and thus, areas with relatively sparse event concentrations but high network connectivity may go undetected. We develop two scan methods (i.e., moving window or focal processes), EdgeScan and NDScan, for detecting local spatial‐social connections. These methods capture edges and network density, respectively, for each node in a given focal area. We apply methods to a social network of Mafia members in New York City in the 1960s and to a 2019 spatial network of home‐to‐restaurant visits in Atlanta, Georgia. These methods successfully capture focal areas where Mafia members are highly connected and where restaurant visitors are highly local; these results differ from those derived using traditional spatial hotspot analysis using the Getis–Ord Gi* statistic. Finally, we describe how these methods can be adapted to weighted, directed, and bipartite networks and suggest future improvements.

  PublisherDOI

• Bridging the parochial divide: Outsider brokerage in mafia families

  Social Science Research · 2023-08-01 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Aesthetic Style: How Material Objects Structure an Institutional Field

  Sociological Theory · 2022-02-08 · 10 citations

  articleOpen access

  How does material culture matter for institutions? Material objects are increasingly prominent in sociological research, but current studies offer limited insight for how material objects matter to institutional processes. We build on sociological insights to theorize aesthetic style, a shared pattern of material object presence and usage among a cluster of organizations in an institutional field. We use formal relational methods and a survey of material objects from religious congregations to uncover the aesthetic styles that are part of the “logics of god” in the United States’ Christian religious field. We argue aesthetic styles help structure an institutional field by spanning objects’ meanings across space and time, stabilizing objects’ authority, and demarcating symbolic boundaries. Our research provides a conceptual tool for understanding how objects bridge the material and symbolic dimensions of institutions and a methodological example for examining the meaning of objects across numerous organizations in an institutional field.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Vertical organizations, flat networks: Centrality and criminal collaboration in the Italian-American Mafia

  Social Networks · 2021-06-12 · 13 citations

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  PublisherDOI

• The Fickle Crowd: Reinforcement and Contradiction of Quality Evaluations in Cultural Markets

  Organization Science · 2021-12-16 · 5 citations

  articleSenior author

  We clarify conditions under which two seemingly contradictory yet widely observed tendencies occur in cultural markets where amateur connoisseurs evaluate products—reinforcement of previous consensus and contradiction of that same consensus. We start from prior work’s insight that achieving “distinction” requires that evaluators display tastes demonstrating higher skills of discernment and standards that are acknowledged as legitimate by others. Based on this, we argue that evaluators reinforce prior evaluations of products to demonstrate that they share the same quality standards as their peers, but they selectively contradict prior evaluations by downgrading widely acclaimed products, because doing the latter makes the evaluator appear to have even more sophisticated tastes than their peers. We test this account using 1.66 million reviews from an online platform where amateur connoisseurs publicly evaluate beers. Our analyses support an endogenous model explaining why and when evaluators may contradict existing evaluations even though a group plausibly sharing the same quality standards may have established such evaluations in the first place. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.1556 .

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: The Complexity of Associative Diffusion

  Harvard Dataverse · 2021-02-08

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This R code replicates Goldberg & Stein's (2018, ASR) agent-based model of associative diffusion.

  PublisherDOI

• The Complexity of Associative Diffusion: Reassessing the Relationship between Network Structure and Cultural Variation

  American Sociological Review · 2021-11-19 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Goldberg and Stein (2018) present an innovative agent-based computational model that shows how cultural associations can diffuse through superficial interpersonal interactions. They counterintuitively argue that segmented networks—for example, those resembling “small worlds” with dense local clustering—inhibit rather than promote cultural diffusion. This finding is notable because it breaks with a long line of influential research showing that local clustering is crucial to diffusion in cases where behaviors and practices—including cultural beliefs—require multiple reinforcements in order to spread. Replicating Goldberg and Stein’s model, we find this result only holds consistently in settings approximating small-group interactions. In models with larger populations, and where cultural associations require repeated reinforcement through social observation, locally clustered small-world networks can promote global cultural variation as well as globally-connected networks, and sometimes do so better. The complex interactions among parameters that lead to this reversal in Goldberg and Stein’s model are instructive for theoretical models of interpersonal influence.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• To racketeer among neighbors

  2021-01-01

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  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Clio Andris

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  6 shared

• Victor Nee

  Cornell University

  4 shared

• Michael W. Macy

  Cornell University

  3 shared

• Hanzhou Chen

  Pennsylvania State University

  2 shared

• Terry Nichols Clark

  2 shared

• Joshua Baker

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  2 shared

• Brittany N. Freelin

  Ashland (United States)

  2 shared

• Arkaida Dini

  Université Paris Cité

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Awards from the American Sociological Association's sections…
• Awards from the Academy of Management's division on Organiza…