Sophie Jacobson

Welcome!

I am a postdoctoral fellow with the Consortium on the American Political Economy, an initiative to cultivate a comparatively informed research community around the study of markets and governments in the United States. I am appointed at the School of International & Public Affairs at Columbia University.

Previously, I was a fellow with the Inequality in America Initiative at Harvard University. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University in December 2021.

I study the political consequences of economic insecurity and social inequality in the everyday lives of Americans. My work applies a policy-focused and comparatively informed lens to unpack ways the United States' uniquely decentralized political economy concentrates real-life disadvantages along dimensions like gender, race, and place, differentiating individual experiences of democratic citizenship. 

I take a bottom-up perspective, privileging the voices most benefitted or burdened by government action or inaction. Methodologically, my research combines archival, interview, and survey-based data collection with an original and widely generalizable microtargeting approach for affordably recruiting hard-to-study research populations online.