Welcome!

I am an Associate Professor of Political Science and a Faculty Affiliate of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I hold a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University, where I received a Harold W. Dodds Fellowship for 2012-2013. My research interests include International Political Economy, Formal and Quantitative Methodology. My dissertation examines firm-level political incentives to lobby for trade liberalization (Winner of the 2015 Mancur Olson Award for the Best Dissertation in political economy in the previous two years). An article version of this research received the 2018 Michael Wallerstein Award for the best published article in political economy in the previous year.

I am also interested in “Big Data” analysis of international trade. I am developing methods for dimension reduction and visualization to investigate how the structure of international trade and trade politics around the globe has evolved over time. I maintain two databases for computational social science research: LobbyView and TradeLab. My work has appeared and forthcoming in various academic journals, including American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Annual Review of Political Science, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Political Analysis, and The Journal of Politics.

Class of 1956 Career Development Associate Professor

Department of Political Science

Massachusetts Institute of Technology


77 Massachusetts Avenue
Room E53-407 (direction)
Cambridge, MA 02142

617-253-3138
insong@mit.edu
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