Helen Milner

Helen V. Milner (born 1958) is an American political scientist and the B. C. Forbes Professor of Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, where she is also the Director of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance.

She has written extensively on issues related to international political economy like international trade, the connections between domestic politics and foreign policy, globalization and regionalism, and the relationship between democracy and trade policy.

She graduated with honors in international relations at Stanford University in 1980 and obtained her Ph.D in Political Science at Harvard University in 1986.

1985–1989

Since 1986 she was a professor at Columbia University and was between 2001 and 2004 James T. Shotwell Professor of International Relations at Columbia University.

In Milner's 1988 book Resisting Protectionism, she seeks to explain why U.S. trade policy in the 1920s was more protectionist than in the 1970s, despite many similar underlying conditions.

She argues that greater economic interdependence in the latter period created a coalition of actors who stood to gain from trade and thus lobbied against protectionism.

The social science research design book Designing Social Inquiry by King, Keohane and Verba characterizes her study as a successful way that qualitative scholars can overcome omitted variable bias.

1990–1994

1995–1999

2000–2004

She moved to Princeton University in 2005, where she served as chair of the Politics department until 2011.

In 2021-2022, she served as president of the International Studies Association.

For the moment, she is conducting research on issues related to globalization and development, such as the political economy of foreign aid, the digital divide and the global diffusion of the internet, and the relationship between globalization and environmental policy.