Lily Tsai

Faculty Director

Lily L. Tsai is Faculty Director of the MIT Governance Lab (MIT GOV/LAB) and the Ford Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her research focuses on accountability, governance, and political participation in developing contexts, particularly in Asia and Africa. In 2014, she founded MIT GOV/LAB, a group of political scientists that works to develop and test innovations in citizen engagement and government responsiveness. By focusing on how and why citizens become active in engaging their governments, Tsai aims to bridge researcher and practitioner communities by developing learning collaborations that can respond to governance challenges using empirical evidence in real time.

In 2015, MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences awarded Tsai the James A. and Ruth Levitan Prize for innovative and creative scholarship. Her book, Accountability Without Democracy: Solidary Groups and Public Goods Provision in Rural China, was published in Cambridge University’s Studies on Comparative Politics and received the 2007-08 Dogan Award from the Society of Comparative Research for the best book published in the field of comparative research. Tsai has also published articles in The American Political Science Review, Political Behavior, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, and World Development. Tsai earned a BA from Stanford University, an MA from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD in government from Harvard University.