Bailey Flanigan (she/her)

I am a Theodore T. Miller (1922) Career Development Assistant Professor at MIT, joint between Political Science and EECS (LIDS). 

You can reach me at baileyf at mit dot edu.

6/29: Come check out our work at EC! Here are some talks on papers by members of the group:

• Monday morning: Carmel Baharav will present on our work on selecting alternates in real-world citizens' assemblies at the From Theory to Practice workshop 

• Monday morning: Rachel Li will present our ICML '26 paper Strategic Candidacy in Generative AI Arenas at the Game Theory and Mechanism Design with Large Language Models workshop

• Monday afternoon: Carmel Baharav will present our working paper, The Ends Justify the Mean: A Linear Ranking Rule for Proportional Sequential Decisions at the New Directions in Social Choice workshop

• Wednesday 9:00 – 10:30: Michelle Si will present our paper Internal Pluralism and the Limits of Pairwise Comparisons

5/25: A belated announcement: the lab has two new members! We're so excited to welcome Adithya Bhaskara and Frank Connor to the lab as PhD students this coming fall :)

5/20: Check out our new preprint with Carmel Baharav, Niclas Boehmer, and Maximilian Wittmann, showing that simple linear scoring rules can be proportional over long-term decisions!

4/16: Our team, led by Ariel Procaccia & including Larry Lessig, Michiel Bakker, and Archon Fung, is among the seed awardees for the Laude Moonshot. We're working on a large-scale deliberation tool!

Research. My research aims to find new ways to combine political science and computer science. The methodologies I work with strongly feature formal theory (i.e., proofs), drawing on tools from social choice, game theory, algorithms, machine learning theory, statistics, sampling methods, and survey research. I focus on applications including political methodology (particularly survey sampling and opinion measurement) and democratic innovations that facilitate more direct public participation (e.g., deliberative minipublics, participatory budgeting, and other forms of preference elicitation). 

Background. Before joining MIT, I was an HDSI postdoctoral fellow at Harvard from 2024-25. I completed my PhD in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in 2024, where I was extremely lucky to have been advised by Ariel Procaccia. My PhD was funded by a Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellowship and an NSF GRFP.

Before that, I studied Bioengineering at UW-Madison, where I primarily researched cancer. Between undergrad and graduate school, I spent a few years doing research in economics (Yale), computer science (Drexel), and public health (Philani Nonprofit in South Africa).

e-mail baileyf at mit dot edu 

office MIT E53-439, 45-501C

links google scholar, dblp, CV