The AIM-3D Project at Notre Dame team was excited to organize a session at Sunbelt 2026: International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) Conference in Daytona Beach, FL.
As part of the session, Valentina (Valya) Kuskova presented “Modeling Democratic Development and Decline with Social Network Analysis,” coauthored with Michael Coppedge and Dmitry Zaytsev.
The presentation explored how we can move from studying democratic institutions as isolated components to modeling democracy as a dynamic network of interacting institutions. Using new AI-based approaches developed within the AIM-3D Project at Notre Dame, we examine how changes in one institution propagate through the democratic system over time. A key question guiding our work: Which institutions drive democratic development and decline?
We are grateful to the Sunbelt and INSNA communities for the opportunity to share our research and discuss how network science, artificial intelligence, and computational social science can contribute to understanding complex political systems.
The full paper behind this presentation, “Trajectory-Aware Node Contributions and the Limits of Static Controllability,” further develops this approach by introducing new methods for measuring how components of complex systems contribute to long-term dynamics. The work extends traditional network analysis by moving beyond static measures of node importance toward models that capture nonlinear and time-varying relationships.
This research is part of AIM-3D’s broader publication pipeline, which includes forthcoming papers at leading computer science conferences, including KDD 2026 and ICML 2026. Together, these works advance new approaches that combine causal inference, machine learning, and computational modeling to analyze complex social and political systems.
