Philip Leifeld

Philip Leifeld is a Professor of Social Statistics at the University of Manchester, part of the School of Social Sciences. He leads the Mitchell Centre for Social Network Analysis and the Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research. Previously, he held a professorship in Comparative Politics at the University of Essex. He is a DFG Mercator Fellow (2022–2027) and chairs the APSA Political Networks Section (2024–2025). His research focuses on policy debates, network analysis, computational methods, and statistical modeling. He is known for developing the Discourse Network Analyzer (DNA) software and the R packages texreg and btergm.

Research interests include political networks, policy subsystems, belief systems, and the application of network science to public policy. Recent work explores discursive change in sustainability transitions, advocacy coalitions in pandemic responses, and automated content analysis using AI tools like ChatGPT.

His work has been published in leading journals such as American Journal of Political Science, Policy Studies Journal, and Network Science. He received the 2023 Best Paper Award for groundbreaking research. Leifeld actively supervises PhD students in topics intersecting politics, network science, and computational methods.