Measure by measure, studying society accurately

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Let’s agree at the outset the world is a complicated place, and social scientists have exacting jobs when it comes to measuring civic phenomena with precision.

After all, even careful studies raise follow-up questions: How much do their findings apply in other settings? Do conclusions about politics in one country apply to other countries? If you’re studying voters in a lopsided election, will your findings apply to voters in a close election? Those questions are all a natural part of the research process.

That’s where Naoki Egami comes in. Egami is an MIT political scientist whose specialty is the methodology of research. He carefully scrutinizes, for one thing, what social scientists call “external validity,” whether the results of particular studies apply more generally.

“I always say political methodology is the field where you ask questions as a political scientist, but then you solve them like an applied statistician or an applied computer scientist,” Egami says. “You find out the underlying mathematical problems behind the empirical challenges people face, and solve them optimally.”

As it happens, Egami’s interests range widely. Years ago, before the current artificial intelligence craze, he started studying what happens when AI tools are introduced into studies. How accurate are they? How can researchers account for AI tendencies? Focusing on these and other questions has helped Egami build a broad portfolio of research, win awards, and flourish in his career.

All the while, he retains interest in basic questions about politics, as well as measuring things correctly.

“You need both perspectives,” Egami says. “If you only think about technical statistical theories, you might not work on interesting empirical problems sometimes. But if you only think about problems, you won’t really solve them optimally; you’ll solve them in an ad-hoc way. So, you really want to have both lenses.”

Egami joined MIT’s Department of Political Science as an associate professor with tenure in 2025. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Statistics and Data Science Center at the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS).

Almost anyone who likes their job has experienced some good fortune in finding it. Egami’s case calls to