a.e.cirone@lse.ac.uk

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

UPDATES

I participated in the AI Summit in Paris in 2025, presenting research on deliberative governance and moderating panels on AI; click here for details.

I helped teach a Masterclass at the WebSummit in Lisbon in 2024, working with Meta on their Community Forums.

Check out the recordings from the conference on “Lotteries and Democracy” I hosted at Yale on December 1, 2023 by clicking here.

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

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 currently serve on Meta's Governance Innovation Council, and have been an advisor for Meta's Community Forums. I'm also a member of Stanford DDL's Deliberation & Technology Research Group, as well as a non-resident fellow at Yale University ISPS Democratic Innovations porgram.

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, the Annual Review of Political Science, and Cambridge University Press.

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 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 was formerly faculty in the Government Department at Cornell University. For academic year 23-24, I was also on leave as a Faculty Fellow in the Yale ISPS Democratic Innovations Program, and visiting assistant professor in the Yale Political Science Department.

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).