Michael A. Bailey

Michael A. Bailey is the Colonel William J. Walsh Professor of American Government in the Department of Government and the MCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.

Bailey teaches and conducts research on American politics and political economy. His work covering trade, Congress, election law and the Supreme Court, methodology and inter-state policy competition has been published in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, World Politics, the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization and elsewhere.

He is author of Polling at Crossroads from Cambridge University Press, a book in which he outlines the pernicious nature of non-response in contemporary polls and advocates for new ways of thinking about the problem.

He is co-author (with Forrest Maltzman) of The Constrained Court: Law, Politics and the Decisions Justices Make from from Princeton University Press. He is also the author of Real Stats from Oxford University Press.

He has also written two statistics books. The goal of these books is to get to interesting and useful statistical material as quickly as possible. To be useful, the books focus on endogeneity (“correlation is not causation”) and to be interesting, the books quickly start using real data sets to answer important questions. The books are quite similar. Real Stats focuses on political and policy examples. Real Econometrics focuses on economic and policy examples.

Bailey has been a visiting faculty member at Sciences Po - Paris, Oxford University and the University of Tokyo. He was born in Minneapolis. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame (BA) and Stanford University (Ph.D.). He was a Monbusho Scholar in Japan and is conversational in Japanese.