Bailey Flanigan

Bailey Flanigan is a Theodore T. Miller (1922) Career Development Assistant Professor at MIT, joint between Political Science and EECS (LIDS). She received her PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2024. From 2024-2025, she was a Harvard Data Science Initiative Fellow, hosted at the Harvard Ash Center for Democratic Innovation. Her research focuses on the development and evaluation of tools and methods for increasing opportunities for democratic participation. Methodologically, her work combines tools from computer science (algorithms, game theory, social choice, and machine learning) and political science (political behavior, political methodology, and political theory).

AI2050 Project

Increasingly, public decisions are too complex for ordinary voting alone: they involve policy trade-offs, complicated allocations, or technical systems such as online platforms and AI. Yet these decisions are too important to leave entirely to experts or opaque algorithms. Flanigan’s project develops new ways for governments to gather and interpret public input on such decisions. Combining political theory and methods, computer science, and real-world civic technology, they will design and prototype a system that lets people express their views in multiple ways—such as text, comparisons, and structured responses—while producing an explicit and contestable representation of public judgment that decision-makers can actually use.