a.e.cirone@lse.ac.uk

My surname is pronounced “Sir-Own-ee” (rhymes with macaroni). I usually go by “Ali.” She/hers.

Check out the recordings from the conference on “Lotteries and Democracy” I hosted at Yale on December 1, 2023: https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2023/12/can-political-lotteries-save-democracy-yale-conference-dives-into-innovations

See recent coverage of my work at Yale here: https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2023/09/redefining-democracy-could-lotteries-improve-governance-and-public-trust

As of August 1, 2024, I am an assistant professor at the London School of Economics, jointly appointed in the School of Public Policy (SPP) and the Government department. I was formerly an assistant professor in the Government department at Cornell University.

For academic year 23-24, I was on fellowship leave and was a Faculty Fellow in the Yale ISPS Democratic Innovations Program, and visiting assistant professor in the Yale Political Science Department. I am currently a non-resident fellow at Yale ISPS.

My research interests center on political selection and institutional design in democracies, lottocratic governance and policy, historical political economy, social media and democracy, and European politics. I combine quantitative and computational methods, historical data, and natural and/or quasi-experimental research designs with extensive archival research. I have also published work on causal inference, data collection, and digitization for historical data.

My recent work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, World Politics, Political Science Research and Methods, Journal of Historical Political Economy, and the Annual Review of Political Science.

My work has won the 2022 APSA Jack Walker Best Journal Article Award, and received an honorable mention for the 2020 APSA Mary Parker Follett prize for best article in Politics and History.

I’m also currently working on a book manuscript on “Lotteries in Democracy,” that studies the use of lottery-based procedures and deliberative democracy in legislative institutions (coauthored with Brenda van Coppenolle).

I'm also part of the Norwegian Research Council grant "Dynamics of Political Selection,” with Jon Fiva, Rune Sorensen, Gary Cox, Dawn Teele, and Dan Smith, where we are studying how seniority systems affect gender representation in politics. As a co-PI on this grant, I also hold an appointment in the BI Norwegian Business School.

I am one of the editors of Broadstreet.blog, a blog on historical political economy; I’m also on the editorial board of the Journal of Historical Political Economy and Legislative Studies Quarterly. I was a founding officer of the APSA Formal Theory Section and the Virtual Formal Theory Workshop. I also organize the Historical Political Economy Working Group, and am currently on the executive council for the APSA Politics and History section.

I have taught an undergraduate courses on fake news, as well as graduate methods, including Natural Experiments, Game Theory, and Comparative Methods. I also teach the core module “Political Science and Public Policy” for the MPA/MPP program for the London School of Economics School of Public Policy.

I hold a PhD from Columbia University in New York, and an A.B. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. I was formerly a postdoc in the Government Department of the London School of Economics (LSE), in the political economy group (PSPE). Prior to beginning graduate studies, I was the Research Manager for Harvard Kennedy School's Evidence for Policy Design (EPod).