Prior positions include appointments at the University of Chicago in Political Science and Computational Social Science, and Washington University in St. Louis in Political Science and as Director of the Center for New Institutional Social Sciences. He holds a PhD in Social Sciences and an MS in Economics from the California Institute of Technology and a BA in Math and Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Patty’s research focuses on mathematical models of political institutions. Areas of interest include political legitimacy, the US Congress, the federal bureaucracy, American political development, and democratic theory.

His book (with Sean Gailmard), Learning While Governing: Information, Accountability, and Executive Branch Institutions (University of Chicago Press, 2012), won the 2013 William H. Riker Book Prize for Best Book in Political Economy, as well as the 2017 Herbert A. Simon Book Prize for Best Book on Public Administration. His second book (with Elizabeth Maggie Penn), Social Choice and Legitimacy: The Possibilities of Impossibility (Cambridge University Press, 2014), tackled the role social choice theory has in ultimately upholding the legitimacy of democratic institutions. Patty has published in many journals, including American Journal of Political Science, Annual Review of Political Science, and Games & Economic Behavior.

At RSF, Patty and Elizabeth Penn are examining how algorithms that classify people, such as the FICO credit score and Equivant’s COMPAS recidivism risk scoring algorithm, shape individual behavior and social outcomes. Their research addresses questions such as how society should regulate algorithms and how issues of individual liberty and privacy should shape such regulations. They are utilizing game theoretic modeling, interviews, and historical analysis of classification algorithms for their project.