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Prof. Bailey Flanigan

Assistant Professor of Political Science and Computer Science

Primary DLC

Department of Political Science

https://polisci.mit.edu/people/bailey-flanigan

Areas of Interest and Expertise

Professor Flanigan's research interests include formal methods, sampling methods, deliberation and deliberative democracy, public opinion measurement and preference elicitation, and design of democratic processes (e.g., voting systems, participatory budgeting, deliberative mini-publics, democratic inputs to algorithms, etc.). Her core methods include algorithms, learning theory, statistics and probability, machine learning, social choice theory, and survey research.

Research Summary

Professor Flanigan is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, with a shared appointment in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Her research combines tools from across these disciplines — including social choice theory, game theory, algorithms, statistics, and survey methods — to advance political methodology and strengthen public participation in democracy. She is specifically interested in sampling algorithms, opinion measurement/preference elicitation, and the design of democratic innovations like deliberative minipublics and participatory budgeting.

Before joining MIT, Flanigan was a postdoc at Harvard University’s Data Science Initiative. She earned her Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and her B.S. in bioengineering from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Recent Work

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