Burt Monroe's research is in comparative politics, examining the impact of electoral and legislative institutions on political behavior and outcomes, and methodology, especially "text-as-data" and other data-intensive and computationally-intensive settings at the intersection of data science and social science. He is particularly interested in the development of multilingual text-as-data techniques to study democratic representation, party competition, and political opposition through parliamentary speech.

Monroe is founding Head of the Program in Social Data Analytics [SoDA], which offers a BS, a doctoral minor, and a dual-title PhD, and founding Director of the Center for Social Data Analytics [C-SoDA]. Both SoDA and C-SoDA are extensions of the NSF-funded Big Data Social Science [BDSS] IGERT, which he directed from 2012-2018, and the Quantitative Social Science Initiative [QuaSSI], which he directed from 2006-2018. He is also Chief Scientist of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy's Mood of the Nation Poll, directing efforts to understand the poll's open-ended survey questions through text analytics.

Monroe was a Rhodes Scholar and received his D. Phil from Oxford University in 1994. Prior to joining the Department of Political Science at Penn State, he was a faculty member at Indiana University and Michigan State University, and a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University.