Elizabeth Thom
College Fellow and Assistant Professor of Political Science and Environmental Policy and Culture
PhD, Harvard University, 2025
Elizabeth Thom studies how the American political economy intersects with social welfare policy, climate and energy policy, and place-based inequality. Her research agenda focuses on the ways that major economic and social transformations reshape communities, policy dynamics, and political behavior. Her current book project, which won the Harvard Government Department’s Charles Sumner Dissertation Prize, explores policy responses to the coal industry’s decline in Appalachia and their political consequences for both individuals and communities.
Thom was a Malcolm Wiener Scholar in Poverty and Justice at the Harvard Kennedy School and a research affiliate with Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability and the Roosevelt Project at MIT, where she published several policy-oriented reports aimed at community-driven, regional strategies for the U.S. energy transition. Prior to graduate school, she worked at the Brookings Institution.
Current Research
Political and Policy Responses to Extractive Industry Decline. Thom examines coal-producing communities that have experienced steep economic declines and major social disruptions. She explores how individuals in impacted communities have turned to the social safety net to weather these negative shocks. Today, government transfers are a key source of income in many postindustrial areas. How do these trends shape the political behaviors of the people who call these places home? How does widespread reliance on federal social policies affect individuals and their communities? What are the consequences of these policy interventions for political participation? Thom puts forward a new model that reexamines the channels through which social programs generate feedback effects in postindustrial contexts.
The Politics of Delay. With Stephen Ansolabehere and Parrish Bergquist, Thom is studying the political economy of developing clean energy infrastructure in the United States. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) and moving to renewable energy requires a dramatic expansion and reconfiguration of the U.S. electrical grid. But connecting the regions with the highest capacity for electricity generation to places with the highest demand will bring about social and political conflict. Thom and her colleagues often observe these conflicts play out in the development of long-distance transmission lines, which cross multiple states and jurisdictions. Today, long-distance transmission projects take, on average, about 10–15 years to move from initial planning to project approvals and construction. The researchers examine how we got here and explain how political and regulatory processes incentivize delays.
Selected Publications
Ansolabehere, S., J. Beckfield, H. Dobie, M. Eason, P. Moudgalya, J. Ornstein, A. Peskoe, E. Thom, and D. Tingley. 2024. Crossed wires: The development of high-voltage transmission lines in the United States. Roosevelt Project and Harvard Salata Institute.
Ansolabehere, S., P. Bergquist, M. Eason, D.A. Evrard, Q. Lewis, and E. Thom, with contributions by J. Beckfield and A. Martinez. 2024. How grid projects get stuck: Four cases in long distance transmission development in the United States. Roosevelt Project and Harvard Salata Institute.
Ansolabehere, S., K. Araújo, Y. He, A. Hu, V. Karplus, H. Li, E. Thom, and D. Tingley. 2021. A low carbon energy transition in southwest Pennsylvania. Roosevelt Project and MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.
Ansolabehere, S., E. Thom, and D. Tingley. 2020. Public attitudes on energy and the climate. Roosevelt Project and MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.
Thom, E., and T. Skocpol. 2020. Trump’s Trump: Lou Barletta and Anti-Immigrant Politics in Pennsylvania. In Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists, ed. T. Skocpol and C. Tervo, 127–48. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
